


Do What You Gotta Do (But be Good to Me)

by goodoldfashioned



Category: RedLetterMedia RPF
Genre: David Lynch - Freeform, Dirty Talk, Drinking, Dysfunctional Relationships, Gay Bar, Green Bay Packers, Hotels, Los Angeles, Love Letters, M/M, Phone Sex, Reunion Sex, Self-Reflection, Vacation, Wistful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:08:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22686766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodoldfashioned/pseuds/goodoldfashioned
Summary: Jay goes to California in search of buff dudes and definitely doesn't think about Mike the whole time.
Relationships: Mike/Jay
Comments: 32
Kudos: 77





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A romantic fic for Valentine's Day! I think my original idea was: Jay goes to Los Angeles, Mike watches the Packers game, they're in love and apart and pining. And it evolved into this. 
> 
> This is about the Half in the Baaaaaaag characters and their world only!
> 
> **

Jay was leaning on a chain link fence and staring at the La Brea tar pits when Mike called for the first time since Jay had left Milwaukee the day before. The picture that flashed onto Jay’s phone screen was from like seven years ago: Mike with more hair than he had now, staring deadpan at the camera and flicking Jay off. Jay had assigned this picture to Mike’s number so he would remember not to answer Mike’s calls. They only ever came at times like this, when Jay strayed outside of their routine and Mike panicked about it.

“What?” Jay said when he answered on the fifth ring. 

“Wow, good morning to you, too, asshole.” Mike’s voice was scratchy. He sounded like he’d just gotten up, though it was noon in L.A. and two hours later in Milwaukee. “What are you up to?”

“I’m on vacation. Do you need something?”

“I’m not calling as your _boss_ , Jay, jesus. I wanted to make sure you arrived safely. You know, the Zodiac Killer is still at large.” 

“Okay, well, I haven’t been murdered--” 

“What’s the weather like there? It’s supposed to snow here, tonight. How are you gonna watch the Packers game?”

Jay moved the phone away from his mouth and sighed. In the tar pit, there was a sculpture of a wooly mammoth braying mournfully as the tar sucked it in, while another wooly mammoth stood on the shore, watching helplessly. Jay’s willpower was the mammoth being sucked into the mire, his better self was the helpless observer, and the tar pit was Mike, same as ever.

“I’m sure I can find a bar that’s showing the game,” Jay said. “Or maybe I’ll just watch in my hotel room. They’re playing the 49ers, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.” 

“Don’t watch it alone in your hotel room, that’s depressing.” 

“Who says I’ll be alone?”

Jay was pretty sure he would be, but Mike deserved to be the one who wondered about Jay’s meaningless hookups for once, and the gut-punched noise he made into the phone made Jay smile triumphantly. 

“Well,” Mike said, scoffing. “You’re missing my party. I’m making fucking potato skins, Jay. Your favorite.” 

“Save some for me, I’ll be back in three days.” 

“They’re not gonna keep for that long!”

“That’s real tragic, Mike, but I think I can carry on anyway. Are you okay?” 

“Me?” Mike sputtered. “Yes. I’m just checking on you. Where are you right now? Are you with a buff dude?”

“Uh-huh,” Jay said, staring at the wooly mammoth sculptures. 

“What’s he look like? Send me a picture.” 

“No! I’m hanging up now. Enjoy your potato skins.”

“I feel like it’s bad luck for you to be in L.A. during this game, Jay. What if they lose and it’s your fault?”

“Bye, Mike!”

Jay hung up and glowered at the bubbling tar, determined not to let Mike’s usual angst-filled mating call crap make his whole day go sideways. He was going to get fucked on this trip, whether Mike liked it or not. Maybe not tonight, because he really did want to watch the game and because he wasn’t going to jump on the first available dick, but before he flew home he was going to have sex with someone who wasn’t Mike. Though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone but himself, that was the whole point of this trip. 

Trying to do it in Milwaukee had been a decades-long failure. Every last corner of that city was too tied up with Jay’s feelings about Mike and their whole sordid history as a not-couple. Same went for all of Wisconsin, and for that matter all of Illinois. At the end of the day, the whole midwest was out, and so was the east coast, because they’d fucked in New York during a work trip. Canada was disqualified because Jay had sucked Mike’s dick in a Toronto hotel room shower during a comic book convention, something Jay only blurily recalled but had definitely happened. 

That left L.A., a city Jay rather liked despite recognizing its downsides. As a kid he had wanted to move to L.A. and start a comedy troupe, or make movies, or even just haul equipment around as a grip, just to be close to the world he’d fantasized about since childhood. He’d visited before, and so had Mike, but they’d never been there together. There was something quintessential about L.A. and Jay’s failure to ever even get close to living there that made it the perfect city for his quest to fuck someone who wasn’t the reason he’d stayed in the midwest.

He couldn’t really blame everything he hadn’t tried hard enough at on Mike, as much as he sometimes wanted to. But his lack of normal engagement with sex and romance and all related bullshit was definitely Mike’s fault. Jay had been a livewire comprised of nothing but angst about the kind of sex he was afraid he wanted when he met Mike, who barreled past all of Jay’s insecurities and showed him that what he’d feared since adolescence was true: yes, he wanted to be fucked by a big guy, with a big dick, who took control without making Jay ask him to and treated him like a fragile, perfect thing after wrecking him on his cock. 

Which should have made what followed simple, or at least simpler. Mike was what Jay wanted and he was right there, always, dragging Jay into every scheme, plot, misadventure and drunken stumble as if Jay was contractually obligated to shadow him at all times. Jay went along with it, every time, because he was stupid in love with Mike in a way that felt leftover from adolescence, though they’d been in their early twenties when all of this began. 

They had behaved like teenagers anyway, because they were stunted on similar levels, though in different ways. Mike was a raw, bloody mess under his stoic exterior and Jay was determined not to be as small and breakable as he looked, which meant they’d hurt each other a lot back then, usually when trying to protect themselves but sometimes just to prove that they could, because they loved each other in a way that made them both angry. It felt unfairly ordained, chafing against what they’d planned to choose for themselves, programmed into their bones. Jay was probably more to blame for the bad times than Mike, but the fact that Mike’s response to being hurt by Jay had always been to flagrantly fuck as many other people as humanly possible didn’t help.

Still, Jay had such golden memories of every time they’d been together, from that first time at Mike’s parents’ house to the most recent time, which had been just a few weeks ago, after the last Packers win. It was always good, which was the problem. They were addicts. 

“Fuck!” Jay said, to the tar pits, because he was standing there like a chump, spending his precious L.A. hours thinking about Mike, just like he’d feared. 

He put that phone call out of his mind as much as possible and drove his little rental car to the place he’d picked out for lunch, something Josh had recommended after his last trip out here. It was suitably hipster-laden, with a line of painstakingly styled young people stretching out the front door at one o'clock. Jay stood at the back of the line, feeling old and unstylish and hungry, still thinking about Mike. 

The first time they fucked was to blame for all of this. It was too special, and happened too soon, at least ten years before either of them were approaching anything resembling emotional maturity. Mike’s parents had been out of town for Mike’s older sister’s wedding. Mike had refused to attend because he hated his sister’s fiance, to the degree that he’d gotten into a fist fight with the man just a few months before. Jay had jacked off thinking about the resulting bruise on Mike’s jaw. He wasn’t proud of this, though by then Mike had already tried to kiss him twice, once successfully. 

They hadn’t discussed the kissing, not after the first time Mike tried it and laughed it off when Jay reeled away from him in shock, or after Mike grabbed Jay as he was walking out the door of Jay’s shithole apartment and kissed him long and deep enough to make him hard, then left without a word and drove back to Chicago. Jay didn’t mind opening up to his close friends, but Mike was a different story, too intuitive. He didn’t pull punches or miss much. There was no way a conversation about this could go that wouldn’t leave Jay exposed from every angle, so he avoided the subject and waited to see what Mike would do to him next.

What he did next was tell Jay that he’d have his parents’ house to himself for the weekend and that he didn’t want to be alone while thinking about his sister marrying that violent piece of shit with his parents’ blessing. Mike had just finished college and was trying to figure out what to do with his life. Jay was already working at the VCR repair shop, living in Milwaukee, thinking about L.A. and about Mike’s voice on the phone. Jay’s whole body would vibrate with gut-churning want when he stretched out on his back in bed and listened to Mike talk about whatever. They’d met at a horror convention in Chicago the previous year, at an aspiring filmmaker panel where Mike had leaned over to mutter comments about the pretentious hack panelists in Jay’s ear while Jay snickered under his breath. Jay was there with a friend from high school, and Mike became their de facto hotel roommate for the rest of the weekend. They all drank heavily and stayed up until dawn talking, and Jay’s high school friend faded into the background while Jay bonded with Mike in a way that made his heart race even before he allowed himself to wonder if he was being flirted with. After that he talked to Mike online or on the phone every day, and they made any excuse to see each other during the weekends. 

Mike had a car and Jay didn’t, so when Mike wanted Jay on his territory he’d have to make the hour and a half trip to Milwaukee four times. The weekend when he took Jay’s virginity was one such occasion, and Jay could already tell on the drive to Mike’s place that something serious was happening. Mike was letting Jay do all the talking in the car, and was agreeing with him too easily on subjects that he’d normally be picky or contrary about just for the sake of getting Jay riled up. 

It was February, frigid and grey outside, a fresh heaping of snow on the way. Mike seemed more depressed than usual, and Jay assumed it had to do with his sister. He followed Mike into the house, noting that he wasn’t putting any lights on as they made their way through its rooms. A gap between the curtains on the windows in Mike’s bedroom allowed just enough greyish light inside, illuminating the unremarkable decor in a way that made it seem even more shockingly impersonal to Jay, whose bedroom walls were plastered with posters and magazine pullouts that represented near everything he cared about. Mike shut the door behind them and fell on Jay like they had planned this together, kissing Jay with his eyes closed and holding his face in both hands, backing him toward the bed. 

“You want this?” Mike asked, and though it was a question Jay felt it like a revelation, like Mike was showing him how bad he wanted this, which made him want it even more. 

Jay nodded and lunged back up onto his toes for more kissing so he wouldn’t have to say anything else on the subject. After that there was no awkwardness or hesitation: Mike took Jay’s clothes off, then his own, got supplies from the drawer on the table beside his bed, and moaned like he was impressed when Jay came in his hand, way too fast. Jay didn’t have to do anything but lie there and let Mike take them past that moment and on into everything else, until they were sweaty and whispering each other’s names into the humid air between their faces, over and over, like their names were the trail of breadcrumbs that would lead them back from what they were doing. 

“I’m gonna move to Milwaukee,” Mike said afterward, when they were wrapped around each other under the blankets, Jay sore and sleepy and in awe of how Mike had taken him to bed like they were in a movie and this was the script. 

“You don’t have to,” Jay said, alarmed by how serious he seemed.

“Yeah I do,” Mike said. “I talk myself out of driving up there to get you like ten times a day.”

“To get me?” Jay said, smirking. “That’s your whole plan?”

Mike either missed the _Ghostbusters_ reference or didn’t think it was funny. He didn’t even smile, just sighed and pressed his face against Jay’s, held him tighter. 

Jay woke up hours later, to the sound of sleet that would turn to snow pelting the window over the bed. He was naked and warm with Mike spooned up behind him and breathing evenly against his shoulder, asleep. Being cozy in Mike’s arms while a winter storm started outside felt like such a final destination that Jay was startled, more comfortable than he’d ever been but also feeling like he’d awakened to find his ankle caught in a bear trap. His life was just starting: he’d finally had sex! His hot best friend wanted him, was maybe even losing his mind over it a little, talking about moving to Milwaukee. Jay would get Mike a job at the VCR repair shop. They’d spend all their time together, at work and afterward, would stay together forever. Jay felt it down to the bottoms of his feet, there in Mike’s twin bed after their first time. He curled his toes against Mike’s shins and felt like he was drowning in the certainty that he would never go anywhere if he could always come back here. 

“Just one?” the hipster restaurant hostess said when Jay reached the front of the line. 

“Yep,” Jay said, pulled back to the present. He was unfazed by dining alone and often went to movies by himself, had lived alone for as long as he could afford to and liked it that way. He’d grown up with five siblings and three different stepparents in two households. He didn’t like being around other people’s chaos, even if he loved them. 

Halfway through his meal, he pulled out his phone to text Josh and thank him for the good recommendation. He had a new text from Mike. It was a picture of Baby Yoda wearing a Packers scarf and holding a football. 

_Are you already drunk_ was Jay’s response. He was grinning, couldn’t help it. 

Mike responded with a picture of the under-construction potato skins. They did look pretty good. Jay sent a picture of his gourmet hipster ricotta toast in reply. 

_are you actually eating bread or is that your date’s lunch_

Jay snorted and wondered if Mike could possibly believe he’d hooked up with someone already. Jay had left Milwaukee after work the day before, and had arrived in L.A. after dark, checked into his hotel and got in bed with his phone, exhausted. He’d browsed Grindr, but just to get the lay of the land. 

_answer me jay_ Mike sent. 

This tugged at Jay in the usual multi-dimensional way. It left him hot across his chest and thinking about Mike’s dick, and also annoyed the shit out of him, because there it was: Mike telling him what to do, Jay wanting to do it. 

He’d only ever refused to do one thing Mike asked him to, which was the thing Mike wanted from him most of all. The more Mike had been confounded by Jay’s impulse to be alone, the more Jay had been sure he needed it, at least for a while. He was all for continued fucking but didn’t want to live together or tell people that Mike was his boyfriend, because who needed to go around flaunting or for that matter having a boyfriend at 21? Why don’t you just tell me you hate me, Mike said at one point, a year after that first time in his room, and when Jay said sure thing, I do, Mike ran away from Wisconsin altogether and stayed gone for almost three years, not counting the times he came back to fuck Jay before disappearing again. When he came back for good they did things differently, never pretending they were going to have any kind of relationship or that they would ever stop needing to throw away whatever else they’d managed to hang onto so they could fuck like maniacs at least a couple of times a year, occasionally three times a day. 

The fights they’d had were epic, movie-script stuff that Jay almost wished they’d taped. Sometimes they ended up fucking during the worst ones. Once they’d trashed the set they’d been working on, taking their rage at each other out on the props they’d built, and then fucked on top of the wreckage. They weren’t often that dramatic anymore, and no longer built sets or tried to make movies together, but they still had their moments of near cinematic disaster. Mike had once introduced Jay as his nemesis. He’d once drunkenly toasted Jay on his birthday, at a bar packed with Jay’s friends and family members, in a twelve minute long speech that included calling Jay the love of his life. The speech concluded when Mike dissolved into tears as his then-girlfriend tried to lead him from the room. It was all water under the bridge, ancient history, and in the meantime they still spent all their time together, until Jay hurt Mike’s feelings by needing space and Mike retaliated by pretending he was going to replace Jay with a normal person, as if sleeping with someone for one night or even three years could ever get him close to doing so.

Jay turned his phone off without responding to Mike’s command to answer him. It would be dangerous to navigate his way around L.A. randomly without his phone’s GPS telling him where to go and when to turn, but it was exciting, too, and the idea of just cruising around all day with his rental car’s windows down and seeing what he could see suddenly sounded like heaven. If Mike also pouted and panicked and spent some time thinking about what he’d done wrong, maybe that was part of the upside. But it wasn’t the entire point, Jay told himself, heading for his car after he’d finished his lunch. 

He ended up in the hills, winding through narrow streets past gated driveways, then in traffic on the freeway, then a junky strip mall where he stopped to get water from AMPM, and finally in a park where he left the car in the lot and walked the busy trails thinking about his whole life’s history and how it might have been different if he’d lived out here even for a little bit. 

Away from the crowded trails, he found a place to sit on the grass with a decent view of the city down below, the sun sinking already. The days were shorter in winter even out here, same as home. His phone was in his pocket, still turned off. The game would be starting within the hour, or maybe it already had. Jay wasn’t sure what time it was, and he liked the feeling of not knowing, wanted to linger within it.

Not checking in with Mike for hours, especially with the game coming on, made him feel cruel. Which was so absurd. Every time he had the instinct to protect Mike’s feelings he had to remind himself of all the times Mike hadn’t returned the favor, and then he was grinding his teeth and telling himself to get over it, move past it, or at least try out another dick before spending the rest of his life the way he’d spent the past twenty years, as the biggest and closest planet in Mike’s orbit but still the one who did the revolving. 

The sunset was blazing by the time he got back to his car, and the traffic on the way back to his hotel in Hollywood was horrendous. He found the game on the radio and winced every time the Packers screwed up. The 49ers were ahead 27-0 and the game was going to halftime by the time he reached his hotel’s parking deck. 

He turned his phone on in the elevator on the ride up to his room. His heart was slamming, for some reason. Too much coffee, maybe. He had a missed call from Mike, but no new texts.

“Are you watching?” Mike asked, slurry already when Jay called him from his hotel room, halftime commercials muted on the flatscreen across from the California king bed. Jay had splurged on a nice room, with a view of the twinkling mansions on the hills. 

“I am now,” Jay said. “Jesus, what happened?” 

“They’re choking, but it’s fine. They’ll bounce back, I can feel it.”

Jay could hear the noise of the party in the background. Mike would have all the usual suspects there, plus whatever woman he was planning to sleep with as revenge for Jay leaving him there to chase California dick. Maybe Mike would even go all out and fuck a dude, though he usually preferred strangers for that, not their friends.

“How was your day?” Mike asked, and Jay’s heart did a lurching thing, as if Mike was in the room with him and all the bloody stuff in the cage of Jay’s chest could strain closer, toward him. 

“Fine,” Jay said, and he cleared his throat when he sounded kind of choked up in a way that didn’t correspond with how he actually felt. He was calm, drinking a beer from the six pack he’d picked up at the AMPM along with his water, in preparation for this moment. “I drove around aimlessly. I turned off my phone.”

“Wow,” Mike said, the meanness back in his voice. “Daring.” 

“Shut up. It was nice. What’d you do?”

“I stressed about this game and cooked and cleaned my place for company. Can’t believe you’re missing this.”

“I’m not missing it, I’m right here.” Jay almost added that this was how they’d fallen in love with each other, after the dizzy excitement of their initial horror convention conversations, where they’d had an audience and had laughed so much that their stomach muscles were sore for days afterward. Their late night phone calls had been different, more somber because they were private, occasionally involving things they would never say to each other in person, because the distance made it safer to say anything, everything. 

“Are you alone?” Mike asked, quietly, and Jay heard less party noise behind his voice, like maybe he’d slipped into his bedroom to ask this question. 

“Yes,” Jay said. 

“Not for long, I bet. Going out after the game ends?” 

“I dunno.” Jay had researched gay bars extensively prior to this trip. He knew he’d feel stupid if he went out, but only until he got tipsy and someone hit on him. He wasn’t hot by L.A. standards, but he had a thing that people in big cities had picked up on in the past, a kind of dorky arrogance that appealed to people who liked to fuck the smart ass attitude out of little blond guys. He’d only ever let Mike do so, in practice. 

“It’s not the same without you,” Mike said. He was probably five beers into the evening, getting sloppy. 

“What’s not,” Jay said, disliking how pleased he was to hear this.

“The game, watching the game, having a party, this fucking city, I don’t know. How’d I even end up here?”

“Hmm, I forget. Okay, get back to your party, don’t get all morose.”

“Jay.” 

“What?” 

“Are you-- What is this, really? Do you know someone out there? Just tell me, it’s better if you tell me now. You’re there to meet someone you’ve been talking to, aren’t you?”

“Uhh, no? I told you, I’m just here to hang out and do whatever. There’s no plan. There’s no guy.” 

Mike sighed. 

“Game’s coming back on,” Jay said, because halftime was over on TV. “Go eat something, you sound wasted.”

“I’m not. You’re such a bad judge of-- Never mind. Later, asshole.” 

“Byyyye,” Jay said, almost adding that he’d call Mike again after the game ended, if Mike didn’t call him first. 

Jay hung up the phone and tried not to think about the fact that he missed Mike already, because it was so unfair. He crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at the TV, not really following the game. He was thinking about those three years when Mike lived elsewhere, after Jay sent him away. Their friends had joked about it, even when it was still raw and recent, saying Jay had brought Mike to Milwaukee, leading him there by the dick, then had kicked him out for being unfaithful. Nobody knew the whole story except two of them, including the part where it almost killed them both to be apart like that. Mike had stalked Jay online, bad enough at it to leave heaps of evidence in the form of fake accounts that slagged off on Jay in ways that no one else in the universe but Mike would ever bother to, and Jay had reveled in it like a sick fuck, hate and love smacking against each other inside him all the time, like sweaty bodies under a blanket in a twin bed.

He browsed on Grindr while the Packers continued to lose. Most of the profiles just made him wish Mike was there with him to laugh at how awful people were. They did so at home sometimes, looking at the Milwaukee profiles. They always ended up feeling too mean.

“We should really check our privilege, Jay,” Mike had said once, when they were doing this and drinking beer, killing time toward the end of their shift at the shop. “These people are just looking for the other half of themselves.” 

“No, they’re not,” Jay said, laughing. “They’re looking for someone to fuck.” 

“You cynic. Okay, maybe. But fucking is part of it. Anyway, have pity. I walked into a basement conference room in the O’Hare airport Hilton and there you were, so. Easy for me to laugh at everyone who wasn’t so lucky.” 

“It was a Hyatt,” Jay muttered, staring at his phone and hoping Mike couldn’t see him flushing from his forehead down to his throat. “And that’s-- Why, though?” He’d long wondered this, because Mike had sat next to him in the audience at that filmmaking panel, and had leaned over to whisper his commentary to Jay like they already knew each other. “I looked like a squirrel back then,” Jay said when he dragged his gaze up from his phone. Mike was staring at him. 

“Yeah?” Mike said. “And I was like, oh, thank god, at last, there’s my squirrel.” 

Jay got drunk, alone in his hotel room and feeling pathetic. He’d finished three and a half beers when the game was all but lost, and moaned under his breath when he saw Mike was calling.

He knew he shouldn’t answer, staring at the picture of Mike flipping him off. He should get up and walk the ten blocks to the bar he’d sorta kinda planned on going to when he picked this hotel. The walk would sober him just enough. Someone sitting miserably alone at the bar might be so glad to see him walk in, and who knew where his life might go from there?

But Jay would be looking for Mike, wanting him to be the lonely guy at the bar who was waiting for him, which was a problem that would follow him everywhere, so he answered the call. 

“They lost,” Mike said.

“Yeah, I was watching.”

“Haaa, Jay. You sound drunk.”

“So do you. Is the party over already?”

“Yeah.” Mike sighed, and Jay pictured him reclining alone in his dark living room, a half-eaten potato skin resting on a napkin on his chest, nearly empty beer bottle tipping toward the couch while he stared at the muted television. “It was depressing, honestly. Depressing game, depressing loss. I knew you not being here would ruin it.”

“Yep, me being in L.A. is directly to blame for Rodgers getting sacked.” 

“That’s right it is. Listen, Jay. You’re too drunk to go out.”

“No, I’m not. Shut up. I’m looking at Grindr, do you want to hear the L.A. highlights?”

“Fuck no! Don’t bust my balls, okay? I could have gotten laid tonight.” 

“You can get laid any night.” Jay resented the truth of this. Mike was overweight and in his forties, but he still had this thing that made people want to get on their knees for him, and if anything he fucked around more now that he was older. For a while he’d pretended he could have a serious relationship that wasn’t with Jay, but those days were behind them.

“I stayed in so I could call you,” Mike said. “And you answered.” 

Jay snarled at the TV, resenting that. Every time he gave Mike an inch, it got thrown back in his face as soon as Mike felt threatened. 

“Swiping on Grindr is making me horny, though,” Jay said, which was true. More often he preferred looking at communities that made fun of bad Grindr interactions to actually browsing the app, but even those weren’t the same as having Mike at his side for commentary. 

“Being horny and drunk in a strange city is the worst time to go out looking for sex,” Mike said. “Act like a grown-up, Jay. Pace yourself.” 

“Make me. You have to get me off, if you’re telling me to stay in.” 

“What-- Over the phone?”

They’d never tried it. Jay had thought about it, so much. He loved Mike’s voice. He already had his fingers tucked into the waistband of his jeans, fingertips stroking over the flat of his belly. 

“Hmm,” Mike said.

“Hmm,” Jay replied, mocking him. “You’re intimidated, aren’t you?”

“No! Fuck that! I’m-- Are you joking? I’ve literally talked you into coming before.”

“Yeah, while your dick was in me. Not from a distance, without touching me.”

Jay was getting hard in his jeans and biting his lip, like there was anyone there to see his insuppressible grin. He heard Mike swallow.

“Hello?” Jay said when Mike stayed quiet.

“I’m here,” Mike said. “Thinking.” 

“Oh, are you too drunk for this?” Jay was teasing him, but would be sincerely kinda brokenhearted if that was the case. 

“No, shut up. What are you-- Are you lying in bed?” 

“Yes. Fully dressed.” 

“Hmph. Let me tell you something, Jay. Something that may horrify you.”

“Jesus, what?” Of course Mike was starting off phone sex with something ‘horrifying.’ 

“When we were kids, when I’d call you up late at night? Sometimes I’d get hard for you laughing at my jokes. How you’d get kinda breathless and do that little Snidely Whiplash snickering noise.”

Jay reached down to palm his dick and bit his lip harder, holding in a similar confession. He had once rolled onto his belly and casually humped his mattress while Mike talked to him on the phone.

“Or was it Snidely’s dog who laughed like that?” Mike said. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jay said, though he did. 

“Muttley!” Mike said, and Jay laughed hard, squeezing his dick and doing the _ke-ke-keh_ cartoon dog cackle that Mike had remarked on before. “God, yes,” Mike said, and he moaned. “Makes you sound so, mhm. Helpless.” 

“Nnh, of course you get off on me being helpless.” 

“Have you ever thought about that, though? How making someone laugh hard, like they can’t help it and can’t stop, is kinda like getting them off?” 

“Eugh, I’d rather not. Not everything is about sex, Mike.” 

“Of course I don’t feel that way about everyone. Just you.”

Jay huffed. Mike was always quick to go there, even when Jay was begging him to be dirty, to get gross. Mike needed to pontificate about this kind of shit almost no matter what, saying that no one else came close, like the rest of the world played for him in black and white. Jay sighed into the phone and unzipped his jeans, thinking about Mike walking into that Hyatt basement conference room and seeing just one person in color: only Jay, everyone else greyed out and interchangeable.

“Don’t feed me romantic bullshit right now,” Jay said. “Say something nasty.” 

“What was romantic about that? Never mind, fuck. You’re the worst.”

“I meant nasty as in sex talk, not insults.” 

“I know what you meant, you pushy little shit. How’s this. I bet you don’t have anything in that hotel room that’s big enough to go up your ass while you jerk off thinking about me.” 

“Big enough?” Jay snorted and glanced around. “I mean, there are like, lamps and chairs in here, some pretty big stuff.” 

“You know what I fucking mean. Something to approximate me. I know your tiny fingers don’t get the job done.” 

Jay flushed and rubbed his dick through his boxers, arching up off the mattress a little. He didn’t love that he got off on Mike talking about how small he was, or that he’d once come screaming Mike’s name because Mike had asked him if he liked having a real man’s cock inside him, but he’d made peace with the fact that probably nobody on earth was a hundred percent happy about the entire catalogue of shit they got off on and how little sense it made when it came to how they actually saw themselves, or wanted to, outside of sex.

“No witty rebuttal for that, huh?” Mike said, and Jay could vividly picture his sharky grin, the one that showed the little gap beside his canine tooth. Jay had hated Mike for having a naturally hot tooth gap, once. He’d never thought such a thing existed, before Mike.

“I mean,” Jay said, breathing a little harder already, “No, like. Of course I don’t have anything Mike-sized to work with, here.” 

“That’s goddamn right you don’t.” 

Jay wasn’t sure if Mike thought he’d fucked other guys. They didn’t talk about it, and sometimes Mike looked so heartbroken at the sight of Jay even smiling at someone else, which was hilarious, or should have been, because Mike was the one who was willing to put out for anyone who laughed at his jokes, and Jay had only ever had Mike.

“You should stream video for me,” Mike said.

“No,” Jay said, because Mike would save it on his phone. “Use your imagination.” 

“Hmm, my imagination. Okay, well, you’re breathing harder than you were a minute ago, so I guess you’re touching your dick, thinking about how sad you are that you can’t have mine in you tonight.” 

“Half right.” 

“I think I’m a hundred percent right, but whatever, Jay. We both know you get off on being a liar.” 

“The hell does that mean?” Jay asked, his hand going still on his dick. 

“Just that you never admit you want something until I’m giving it to you hard and I make you beg for more.” 

Jay grunted, satisfied that Mike was at least making that comment part of their dirty talk. He thought of saying something like, that’s not lying, exactly, but didn’t want to further discuss his psyche while trying to jerk off. 

“Are you wearing jeans or sweatpants?” Jay asked. 

Mike snorted. “Sweatpants,” he said. “Why?”

“I need to know how to picture, uh. What your dick looks like right now.” 

“Aww, that’s adorable, okay-- I’m like, half-hard. Do you have lube? Did you bring special lube on this trip?”

“Yes.” Jay had packed a discreet travel-sized tube in his carry-on, with the rest of his toiletries. “Should I get it?” he asked, needy enough by then to just want Mike’s instruction. 

“No,” Mike said, sharply. “Not yet.”

Jay shivered and licked his lips, nodding reflexively. Of course Mike would make him wait, wind him up first. He always did.

“I presume you’re wearing jeans,” Mike said. 

“You presume correctly.”

“And that you’re tenting them like a bitch and leaking into your underwear just for the sound of my voice.” 

Jay huffed, which was as good as admitting: yes, accurate.

“Yeah,” Mike said, and Jay could hear his grin. Mike was breathing faster, too, and definitely palming himself in the absent-minded way he did, with the heel of his hand, almost like he was telling his dick to calm down. “Yeah, you’re all sticky for me already, aren’t you? Throbbing in some extra-tight jeans and wanting to take your little prick out.” 

Jay had opened his jeans but still had his boxer briefs pulled up, his tented not-actually-little dick protruding from the open fly in a way that Mike would like, if he could see it. Mike liked it when Jay was partially clothed, when he couldn’t even get out of his pants without needing Mike’s hands on him. He liked that Jay had an average-sized dick because it didn’t matter, Mike’s was still huge in comparison.

“Hey, listen,” Jay said, pushing his thumb into the slit in his briefs to spread the precome from his cockhead down along the shaft. He was just drunk enough, and lonely enough, to ask for this stupid thing. “Tell me, ah. Tell me what was going through your head the first time we fucked. How it felt for you.” 

Mike sucked in his breath, maybe just because he was touching his cock. 

“Been thinking about that?” he said, his voice pitched low like a threat. 

“Mhmm,” Jay said, nodding again. He felt dumb but safe, which was how Mike always got him all fucked up, that deadly combination. “Just, you know. You barely said anything, till after. Till you said you’d move to Milwaukee.” 

“What’d you want me to say, Jay? The kind of shit I say to you now? Wanted me to call you a dirty slut because I could feel how much you wanted it?”

Jay groaned, stroking himself. Was he actually going to beat off to a dissection of their history of dysfunction? Maybe it would the darkest sex thing they’d ever done, though some past ones would be hard to beat.

“How could you even tell?” Jay asked. He let his eyes fall shut and tipped his head back, still stroking himself the way he’d wanted to back then, on the phone with Mike, before they’d ever touched each other. 

“How could I tell what, that you wanted my dick?”

“Fuh-- Yeah, how, just. When did you know? I wouldn’t even let you kiss me, that-- That first time. But then you tried it again.”

“What are you talking about, I kissed you nonstop--”

“I don’t mean the first time we fucked, I mean the first time you-- The first time you tried to do anything to me, when you got up in my face and laughed when I jumped away. I thought you were just fucking with me--”

“Why are you asking this? You want tips for how to act when someone new seduces you?”

“Maybe. Who cares? Answer my question, how’d you know about me?”

“I didn’t, asshole! I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try again, without acting like it was a joke, and when I did you fucking melted for it and pressed up against me like no one had ever touched you like that before, because they hadn’t. Then I left you to sit and think about it for a few weeks, then I fucked you like I owned you, the end. Or it shoulda been.”

“Like you owned me,” Jay said, breathing this out and leaving the rest of that unexamined. “Yeah, you-- You did, Mike. Fuck, and I loved it. But how did you know I would?”

“What do you want to hear, that you were giving off some gay pheromone that told me everything? I didn’t know shit and I was fucking terrified! Then you broke my heart and proved me right-- I thought we were doing phone sex? Wait-- wait. Jay, you fucking pervert, are you jerking off to this?”

“Kinda.” 

“You are truly a sick little man.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m not beating off to your angst, Mike. I just want to hear what it felt like for you. To take me to bed like that and just-- Physically, I mean.”

“It felt amazing, what-- You want me to talk about how tight your ass was? I’d rather talk about what I’d do to you now, if I was there.” 

“It’s still tight,” Jay said, not sure if he was being a tease or sincerely defensive. 

Mike moaned like it was the former. “No shit,” he said. “Think I haven’t noticed how you wall yourself off like a nun for weeks at a time, so it’ll feel-- Ngh, like the first time, every fucking time.” 

“That’s not why-- I don’t do that.”

“Well, if it’s not that, then it’s something worse.”

Maybe Mike was asking if Jay was fucking around with other guys when he wasn’t drooling onto some piece of furniture at Mike’s place or at work while Mike plowed him. 

“Something worse,” Jay repeated, annoyed with him. “Sure, yeah, let’s say it’s worse, Mike. Much worse. So what would you do about it, if you were here? What would you do to me?”

“Sometimes I really do think you jerk off to the idea of being murdered,” Mike said, and Jay wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be hot or not. “Like, you snuff yourself in your fantasies.”

“Wrong,” Jay said. “Answer me, Mike.”

“What would I do to you? I’d let you have my dick, but only if you crawled to me on all fours and begged for it.” 

“Yawn,” Jay said, because they’d done that many a time in real life. 

“What do you want me to say, that I’ll dismember you?”

“Nope, colder,” Jay said, starting to feel a little guilty for enjoying this. He made himself remember that time at the comic convention in Canada when he’d blown Mike in the shower. Mike had fucked a wall-eyed girl with a podcast the very next night. “Try again.” 

“Okay, Jay. Here’s what I’d do. I’d nudge you toward the bed, and you’d start to sit on it, but I’d grab your elbows and hold you up, and I’d strip you down to your underwear while you stood there red-faced and gaping at me like you were afraid to even beg for mercy, breathing hard.”

Jay swallowed and opened his eyes, his hand slowing down on his dick. 

That was how it had gone their first time, in Mike’s room at his parents’ house. 

“Then what,” Jay said, his mouth feeling dry. He sat up on his elbow to gulp some more beer, releasing his dick for the time being. 

“You’d look at me like for a second you were afraid I wasn’t going to take my clothes off, too. And I’d-- Have to-- Tell myself not to freak out. Because nobody had ever been in my palm that way before. And I’d never thought I would want to be nice to someone who was.” 

“I wasn’t afraid,” Jay said, and he cleared his throat when his voice shook a little. “I was cold.”

“Jay--”

“No, continue. Go on.”

“Well, I-- I’d take my shirt off, and your eyes would sink down to my chest, and you’d watch me unbuttoning my jeans, and I’d watch your dick getting hard in your boxers, and once I was stripped down to mine we’d meet each other’s eyes again and it was like-- This fucking lightning bolt. I’d had sex before, but. Nothing had ever felt like that, and we weren’t even touching each other yet. And your face was so red.” 

“I wanted to say something cool,” Jay said, pinching his eyes shut in agony at the memory. “Like, something that would make me seem less like a virgin. But my voice wasn’t working and I had no fucking clue what to say. I was afraid I’d just say your name, and my voice would break when I did.”

“I would have loved that, okay.”

“Well, obviously! But I wouldn’t have.”

Mike snorted. Jay felt his chest heat up, felt himself grinning. He wrinkled his nose and huffed into the phone, hoping Mike wouldn’t need to be asked twice to keep going.

“So then,” Mike said, and Jay heard him swallow. “Then I’d make a big production of getting out a condom and lube-- Real lube! Which I’d bought just for you. Which was mortifying. Like, I drove all the way to Bolingbrook so nobody would know me at the Walgreen’s.” 

“Jesus, Mike.” Jay wondered if Mike could hear that he was grinning huge, also that his eyes were burning a little.

“Well,” Mike said, thickly, like maybe he could hear those things. “It was important. The whole thing. My big plot to win you over for good. I wanted you to know that I knew what the fuck I was doing.”

“Anyone would have, compared to me.” 

“Yeah, but-- You’d watched enough porn to know what to expect, right?” 

“In theory, sure.” 

They both laughed a little, like they were those nervous kids again, though back then they’d been stone cold serious and hadn’t even cracked smiles until afterward, when Jay tried to get Mike to at least grin at his Ghostbusters joke and got nothing.

“Then what,” Jay said. He knew, of course. He remembered every detail. He just wanted to hear it, now, in Mike’s voice, over the phone. 

“Then I’d lift up the blankets on the bed and have you get under them, ‘cause yeah, it’s cold in this room. In your fucking L.A. hotel room.” 

“Ha,” Jay said, still picturing Mike’s chilly bedroom and the two of them as kids. Back then, twenty-one and twenty-three, they never would have called themselves that and would have sneered at anyone who tried to suggest they weren’t grown up, world-weary already, tough as shit. Jay had hated how he looked, because he did look like a kid, but Mike didn’t, at least to Jay. He’d looked like the most grown up person in the fucking world when he climbed under those blankets, and Jay felt small enough to entirely disappear underneath him, which was what he’d wanted, though he hadn’t known this until he had it.

“Want me to say the next part?” Mike asked. 

“What-- Oh.” 

“Yeah, you’d be so hard up for it, after twenty-four hours without me, I’d reach in past the waistband of your-- What are you wearing, those little boy shorts?”

“They’re called boxer briefs, asshole, and no.” He was wearing those, presently. “Boxers,” he said, because that was what he’d been wearing back then.

“Okay, boxers, I’d reach in and I’d think, well, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, this part is new, and you’d grab both my arms as soon as I had my hand around your dick and arch up like whatever clueless groping I was doing was amazing and then you were coming, holy shit.”

“Yeah,” Jay said. He pushed his hand in past the waistband on his briefs and took hold of his cock, swallowing a moan down when he squeezed himself. “It, just. Your hand.” 

“Mhm, yeah, I get off on yours, too. So fuckin’ tiny.” 

“Nnf,” Jay said, because he knew Mike had his hand around himself, too, pushed into those sweatpants. They both liked watching each other jerk off but barely ever did it, because there was always something more urgent to do to each other. 

“You said you were sorry like fifteen times,” Mike said, “All breathless and fucking-- Cute. Looking like you were gonna cry or something. And I kissed the shit out of you, to shut you up, and because, you know.”

Jay didn’t bother pointing out that Mike had slipped into past tense or ask what he meant by _you know_. Jay did know. It had been a huge comfort, to be kissed like he was a miracle for something that had briefly made him feel like a failure. Everything he felt after that was all wonder and relief, until he woke up in Mike’s arms and started to worry that finding Mike right at the start of his real adult life was like beating a video game too fast, without getting to see the whole map or do any of the side-quests.

“Okay, so you’re on top of me,” Jay said, taking them back to the present, because describing their first time wasn’t as good as pretending they were reenacting it, too. “And I’ve just come in my boxers, and they’re all gross, and I want to take them off but you’re kissing me and I just. I don’t know. I don’t want to make any decisions, even about my own boxers. And you pull back and stare down at me, and it’s like you know this, so you take them off for me.”

“You sound so drunk,” Mike said, fondly or with concern, maybe both.

“No, I don’t.” Jay realized in saying this that he hadn’t eaten anything since that ricotta toast, which seemed like days ago. “Anyway, go ahead. Next.”

“Next,” Mike said, and Jay heard him exhale in a choppy way that either meant he was really hard, aching to come, or emotional. “Uh, well. I have this thought, like. I want to clean the come off your dick but it seems rude to use your boxers and I don’t want it on the sheets. So I just stick my head under the blankets and lick it all off, like a lunatic.”

Jay groaned, remembering. He still wasn’t sure it made sense, but he’d felt forgiven for everything weird he’d ever wanted when Mike did that.

“I’d be very into it,” Jay said, needlessly. He had been close to overstimulated but hadn’t cared, had put both his hands on Mike’s head and fucked his soft dick up into Mike’s mouth while Mike licked him clean. He was getting hard again by time Mike pulled off. They counted it up at the end of that weekend and concluded that they’d each had approximately sixteen orgasms over three days. 

“So,” Mike said, clearing his throat. “Once you were, uh, cleaned off, I’d take my boxers off under the blanket and lean up to kiss you again, and would hope that you gasped into my mouth because you’d just felt how big my dick is, because now it’s jammed against your hip, and I’m hoping you won’t shove me off and say you aren’t having anything to do with it.” 

“You thought I was such a wimp.”

“Not exactly, just. A scared virgin.” 

“Ha, no. I mean, I was, but I wanted to be hardcore, show you I could take it.” 

“Fuck, Jay-- Are you still jerking off?”

“Of course. Are you?”

“Mhm, yeah. So, like. What’d you think?”

“About-- What, your dick?”

“Yes, Jay!” Mike huffed like Jay was being cruel, making him ask.

Jay snickered and pinched his eyes shut, deciding then that he was drunk after all, and that it was a good thing, because he wanted to last a while, wanted this to go on and on. 

“Here’s what I’ll tell you about that,” Jay said, trying to sound as not-drunk as possible. “I did not know what I was getting myself into, so I thought, oh good, he’s really, really big! I thought, you know. I deserved the biggest dick out there, if I was gonna have one at all.”

“You idiot,” Mike said, but he was also almost giggling, clearly charmed.

“I’m serious!” Jay said. 

“I know you are. That’s why I’m laughing.” 

There was a comfortable lull then, and Jay could picture Mike’s dopey grin so vividly that it was like they were in the same room together. He remembered feeling that way during their first few phone calls as fledgling best friends, like the sound of Mike’s voice in his ear meant that he wasn’t alone in his room or anywhere.

“So what do you do to me next?” Jay asked. 

“I, uh. Let’s see. I think I kissed-- I kiss your neck for a long time and sort of bite you a few times, because I think you’ll like that, and you do.”

“Fuck yeah, I do. Mark me up.”

“I don’t think I did?”

“Nah, you were pretty timid that first time.”

“Hey now. I’m about to stick my fingers up your ass. Timid! Like hell.”

“Did you do like, gay sex research?” Jay asked, wrinkling his nose at the thought. “I can’t imagine you watching gay porn in your parents’ house. Or in college, with all your nasty roommates.”

“I mean. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Jay, but there’s plenty of anal in straight porn.”

“Oh god. Never mind. Back to what you’re doing to me, please.”

“Mhm, well, stop interrupting me. Okay, uh. I stop gnawing on your neck and lean back to look at you, and I tell myself I’d better not hesitate or overthink this. So I grab for the lube. And, Jay, I don’t know if you remember this or even noticed you did it, but-- When I opened the cap on that fucker? You bit your lip and spread your fucking legs. Holy shit. I almost came all over you then and there.”

“I-- Don’t remember that,” Jay said, sincerely. “I mean, uh. I knew what you were about to do, so. It was the logical response.”

“Yeah, that was pure logic, no animal instinct or anything like that.” 

“Speaking of lube,” Jay said, not wanting to think about how dumb and childish he must have looked, gnawing on his lip and lying there waiting for Mike to do whatever to him. “Should I get mine now?” 

“What? Oh, yeah. Fetch that lube, Jay. You’re gonna need it. That is, if-- Will you be playing along at home?”

“Don’t call it that, eugh,” Jay said, wincing as he slid out of bed. “And I’m not home.”

“Yeah. I know you’re not.”

Jay felt a little shaky on his feet, and wondered if he should order room service. In the meantime he took another slug from his beer before heading for the bathroom for his lube. He’d set it out on the counter with his other stuff but also covered it with a folded hotel washcloth: discreet, even in his own room, just in case. He’d put the washcloth over it thinking he might bring a guy back here, imagining the guy needing to take a piss or something before they really got going, and seeing the lube there. He’d been afraid this theoretical guy would laugh and think: this little midwestern slut, he doesn’t even know how to be subtle, that’s cute.

He decided Mike was right, though he didn’t plan on admitting it: he was too drunk to go out, his mind already going to weird places, like this reenactment thing he was doing on the phone, of course with Mike. He wasn’t sure he’d ever even flirted with anyone else. 

“I’m back,” he said when he was on the phone again, in bed, stripped out of his pants and briefs, holding the lube. He’d closed the curtains over his pretty nighttime view of the hills.

“Are you under the blankets?” Mike asked. “‘Cause you should be.” 

“Sure,” Jay said, squirming to obey. It was kind of cold in his room anyway, now that he was only wearing his t-shirt. “Under them now.” 

“Good. Don’t touch yourself, though. Not unless I tell you to.” 

“Fine,” Jay said, his dick doing an anguished yet approving jerk-twitch against the starchy sheets. 

“Because you didn’t, you know-- You put your hands on my shoulders and just left them there. And, when-- You were squeezing me so hard, remember? I thought I’d have bruises, but I didn’t.” 

Jay had been disappointed, too. Mike left a couple of marks on him, things Jay didn’t notice until after that horrible drive back to Milwaukee when Jay’s stomach was all torn up because he’d said something like, don’t move to Milwaukee right away, though, right? Think about it for a few weeks, right? I mean, where are you even gonna live?

Which had sounded enough like, you’re sure as shit not moving in with me, which was indeed what he was trying to say, gently. He loved Mike but was overwhelmed, afraid that Mike would want him three times a day like that for the rest of their lives. Which was a good instinct, because he would, even when they hated each other. Maybe especially then.

And then Mike moved to Milwaukee within the month anyway, and Jay took it personally, like Mike was telling Jay that he couldn’t tell Mike what to do. Jay felt like he should be able to, if Mike really loved him, which was maybe insane, but Jay was basically a kid and very scared about everything, especially anything that appeared to be a good thing that was somehow happening to him. 

“So, question,” Jay said when Mike was just quiet for a stretch, probably thinking about all the same awful things that suddenly didn’t feel so far away or long ago anymore. “Am I-- Not touching my dick, or not touching anything?” 

“You can stuff your sad little fingers in,” Mike said, sounding angry, which meant he’d definitely been thinking about the past, too. “Just do it exactly how I tell you to.” 

“Fine-- Okay.” Jay cleared his throat as quietly as he could manage and popped open the lube. He tried not to think about how small his fingers looked as he spread some on them, or how thick Mike’s were. 

“So, now,” Mike said, and Jay was relieved, had been afraid for a moment that the mood was ruined. “Now I’m kneeling between your spread apart legs under this blanket, and you’re staring up at me with your lips parted and you’re breathing hard, and I can feel how hot you are, all over, even though we’re not touching. And I squeeze your thigh and it’s shaking.” 

“Mmph,” Jay said, squeezing his thigh with his unlubed hand. It wasn’t shaking now, and he wasn’t conscious of any shaking back then, but he didn’t doubt Mike’s recollection.

“And I don’t say I love you, because I know you don’t want to hear it.” 

“You didn’t know that yet,” Jay said, not willing to play along with Mike’s self pity, because really, as ever, was it necessary? Jay could hang up and go find a guy who would fuck him live and in person. Technically, he still could. Technically that had always been true. He had never needed to put up with this shit, he just always had.

“But I look at you for a long time,” Mike said, softer. “So you’ll know.” 

Jay pressed his lips together. Did he know? He did afterward, when Mike held him for like four hours, until Jay was desperate to escape and clean himself up, take a leak, eat something. Before, when Mike was pressing that first finger into him, Jay’s heart had gone crazy for the thought that Mike had seen it on him the day they met, that he’d known right away that Jay would let him do this, and maybe all the phone calls and weekends spent watching movies together in Jay’s room had just about been about this. Then Mike kissed him again, or touched his prostate, or something, and Jay floated away from that worry.

This was the part where Jay’s memory of every little move they made fragmented, because he’d started feeling really good and had lost his train of thought and sense of time.

“Put one in,” Mike said, his voice getting all breathy. “Slow, like you’re afraid it’ll hurt.”

Jay whimpered, unintentionally, though it didn’t hurt at all to obey this command. It felt good, but not good enough, not like what he really wanted.

“Okay,” Jay said, peering blearily up at the hotel room ceiling. He could see Mike hovering over him, the memory conjured over him like a vision, and he wondered now how he’d missed back then that Mike had been so nervous, too, maybe even more than him. “One’s, uh, in.” 

Mike made a whining noise that made Jay worry he was already close. 

“Tell me,” Mike said, “How much you wish it was me.”

“I always wish it was you,” Jay said, more angrily than he’d planned to.

“When you’re with other guys.”

“No-- I--” Now was not the time for the confession that he’d only ever been with Mike. “You’re the one who gets around,” Jay said, which was maybe worse. “Do you think about me, when--? I doubt it.”

“I’m usually blackout drunk when I fuck people who aren’t you,” Mike said. He sounded suddenly thoughtful and sober, not even a little angry. “So I have no recollection of what I think about. Maybe you. Why not.”

“Shut up, just--”

“You’re the one who keeps changing the subject. Put another finger in, not careful this time.”

Jay bit his lip hard, so that it would hurt, when roughly shoving another finger into himself didn’t hurt the way he’d wanted it to. Those years when Mike didn’t live in Milwaukee anymore but kept showing up there in ghostly interludes, like he was haunting Jay against his will, Jay would goad Mike to fuck him till it hurt. Once Mike cried about it after, and called Jay mean names that came out sounding like a succession of horrible little love confessions. When Jay finally said, it’s just so I’ll still feel it after you go away again, Mike moved back home for good.

“Then what,” Jay said, fucking himself with two fingers and pressing his untouched dick up against the blankets. His mouth was wet. He had to swallow the excess spit that he normally would have slobbered onto Mike’s mouth while they kissed. 

“I keep wanting to say something about how hot you are,” Mike said. “Inside, and, like, so tight, like I’m sure I’m hurting you, or ruining something perfect, but I’m gonna keep doing it anyway, because I think I knew you in a past life or something, or in like a hundred of them--”

“You don’t believe that,” Jay said. 

“I-- What?”

“Past lives? Even for you, that’s-- No.”

“Yeah, Jay, _yeah_ , keep telling me what I’m allowed to believe in or not, unf, you’re really getting me off here.”

“Fuck you!” Jay said, and then he was laughing, and so was Mike.

“How am I supposed to continue this,” Mike said when Jay stopped laughing, “If I can’t actually fuck you.”

“Just-- Keep talking, I don’t know.” 

“Maybe I’m a real psycho,” Mike said, “Like you think you want, and maybe I flew out to L.A. and tracked you to your hotel like a stalker, maybe I’m out in the hallway on my phone right now.”

Jay snorted and glanced at the door to make sure he’d bolted it. “That’s the opposite of what I want,” he said. “And you know it.”

“That you think I know the first fucking thing about what you want from me is really kind of astonishing, but never mind. If I was there? In the hallway, kicking down the door, whatever? I’d flip you onto your stomach and pull your arms behind your back and hold them there while I fucked you till you were crying, how’s that?”

“I’ve never--”

“Your eyes have leaked! Don’t deny it, Jay. I was there. Making them leak.”

“Mike.” Jay huffed and shoved a third finger into himself, without permission. “Fuck, I feel like. I’d almost forgive you if you were out there, nnh. Fuckin’ need it.”

“It?”

“You, your dick, just-- Talk more, please?”

“Okay, all right, poor Jay, you need it bad?”

“ _Yes_ , just-- Nnh, Mike--”

“Hold the phone near your ass so I can hear you finger-fucking yourself pitifully.” 

“No!” 

“Hmm, well, maybe you can get yourself off alone, then.”

“I’m not doing that! Ask for something else.” 

“Why is that a bridge too far? Jesus, you’re so mysterious. Anyway, uhh. Pull your fingers out, it’s no use. You can barely reach your good spot with those puny little things.”

“Don’t call it a good spot,” Jay said, and he moaned when he extracted his fingers, wanting to put them back in and almost wishing he’d been shameless or defeatist enough to pack a giant silicone dick for this trip.

“Oh, ‘cause the word prostate is so fucking hot. Did you do what I asked you to?”

“Yes!”

“So, how’re you feeling?”

“Nhf, empty, I don’t know. Mike.”

“Where’s your free hand?”

“On my chest.” 

“Ohh, are you tugging on your nipples? Wishing you had my teeth on your tits? That’s cute. Stop it, though. Put the hand that isn’t holding the phone flat on the mattress.”

Jay whined but obeyed, chewing his lip. His eyes were closed.

“What do you need,” Mike asked, in a mockingly seductive tone that made Jay hear the _baby_ that Mike wisely didn’t tack onto the end of that question. “Tell me, go ahead.”

“To touch my dick,” Jay said, flushing all over for how pathetic he felt, and how hard his cock throbbed for the feeling. 

“Nn, no, I think you need something else, something better, something I can’t give you right now because you ran away like an asshole and cost the Packers a Superbowl appearance.”

“Mike!” Jay wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or hit him. “You’re not funny.”

“Not trying to be, Jay, I’m just trying to help you. Beg for what you really want, even if I can’t give it to you.” 

Jay sighed. Mike knew what he wanted.

“But don’t say it like this is happening now,” Mike said, and Jay remembered that Mike was drunk, too. “Ask for it like you’ve never had it. Like we’re barely past the turn of the century and we still don’t know each other that well. Like I tried to kiss you that first time, and you rejected me, but when I was gone you decided you wanted me to try it again.”

Jay felt spinny, somewhere between turned on and irritated. He exhaled and rubbed his dick against the sheets, which were tucked in tightly enough that they provided decent friction, but not enough to get him off.

“I never would have asked for it back then,” Jay said, like Mike didn’t know this too well. 

“Yeah but, what if you had? What would you have sounded like? Show me, go.”

Jay whimpered. Mike moaned into his ear like that was a good start. 

“I want you to fuck me,” Jay said, keeping his eyes closed and picturing himself saying this in his childhood bedroom, to Mike who was in Chicago, in his own childhood bedroom, breathing into Jay’s ear on the phone, very late at night and before either of them had any idea how this would go. 

“Okay,” Mike said, flat and cocky like he would have back then. He’d always sounded that way when he had Jay where he wanted him. “How do you like to be fucked?”

I’m gonna need you to show me, Jay almost said. He whined and shook his head on the hotel room pillow, eyes pinched shut tight. 

“Hard,” Jay said, his voice coming out uncertain, like he was asking a question rather than giving an answer. “Just, and. Like there’s nothing I can do about it. Like I’m helpless and I just have to take it.” 

“Why’s that,” Mike said, breathing harder. 

“Ah, I-- I dunno. Because, I guess. I don’t want it to be my fault when I like it.” 

Mike groaned and Jay jerked his hips more urgently under the tightly tucked blanket, his cock starting to chafe against the sheets. 

“Are you jerking off?” Mike asked, his tone like a warning.

“No,” Jay said. “I want to, please--”

“Not yet. You gonna let me come inside you? When I fuck you? Gonna let me leave a mess?”

“Muh, yeah-- Yeah, I will, I want it. Want you to.”

“Why, Jay. Why would you ever want that.”

“‘Cause it’s yours.”

“You like me that much, huh.”

“I-- Yeah. Mike. Just, I-- If you told me to get on my knees, I would. Don’t ask why.” 

“Because you don’t want to tell me, or because you don’t know?”

“I know why. Nnh, I, just. Don’t want to say it.” 

“How about I say it, then, Jay.”

“Yes, yeah, okay--”

“You’d get on your knees for me because you’re a desperate slut for my dick, because you belong to me, because you want all the nasty shit you do for me to be my fault.” 

“Yeah,” Jay said, too wound up and needy to deny any of that. “Mike, yeah, just--”

“You’re a little pervert and you want someone to blame, don’t you?”

“ _Yes_ , fuck--”

“You want me to drive over there and corrupt you. With my hand over your mouth, right? While everyone else is asleep. Climb in through the window, bite your ear till it’s bloody while I’m pounding into you, make you cry on my cock, make you come on it--”

“ _Mike_ , please--”

“You can touch your dick now, go ahead.” 

Jay groaned with relief, as if his hands had just been untied. He flung the bedsheets away. He’d grown hot underneath them, sweaty, and still had enough lube on his hand to jack his cock with a comfortable slide, feeling tight all over and ready to spill. 

“There you go,” Mike said, breathing choppy and certainly jerking his own dick now, if he hadn’t been all along. “Touch yourself and think about me defiling you with my big, fat cock, fucking you till your face is burning and wet, till you’re sobbing into my palm cause I won’t let up even after you’ve come all over yourself and your fucked-open ass feels like it can’t take any more.” 

“Please, I can,” Jay said, his hand going frantic on his dick, back arching, head thrown back. “I can, just-- Make me take it, don’t stop--”

“Nnh, yeah, you can take it, you’re right. Just lie there crying while I keep claiming you, over and over. Keep those shaking legs spread for my cock while I lick up your fucking tears.” 

Jay came before he was ready, his hips jerking up off the bed as he moaned and pumped himself through it, splattering his t-shirt with white streaks. 

“Fuck,” Mike said, his voice pinched tight in a telltale way. “Did you just, Jay, did you--”

“Yeah,” Jay said, still panting through it. “Mike, ah, fuck. Wish you were in me.” 

“Jesus, fuck, yeah. Gonna give you what you need when you come home. Put you on your knees at the shop and make you, ngh-- Make you suck me off under the counter during our shift, gonna stay in your mouth all fucking day, pet your hair and tell you you’re a good boy while you keep me warm.”

Jay made some kinda sound and Mike matched it like an echo in Jay’s ear, then cursed under his breath and said Jay’s name like it was the dirtiest word he knew. 

“You coming?” Jay asked, blissed out and already knowing the answer to this question. Mike was panting raggedly. Jay could swear he felt the heat of Mike’s breath through the phone, on his skin. 

“Fuck,” Mike said, still breathless. “Yes, I-- Yeah. Shit. Jay.”

“Yeah?” 

Mike grunted with what sounded like encroaching discomfort. Jay imagined him wincing at the mess. Maybe he’d shot his load onto the coffee table right there in his living room, heedless.

“This sucks,” Mike said. 

“I thought it was pretty good,” Jay said, rubbing his belly the way Mike would have if they’d actually just fucked. It was probably just supposed to be tender and reassuring, but Jay liked to imagine Mike was also getting off on the thought of Jay being filled up with his come. 

“It was good,” Mike agreed, sounding reluctant. “But now I can’t-- You know. I’m by myself here, with this mess.”

“Oh, sorry. I’d lick it up for you if I was there, is that the idea?”

“No.” Mike snorted. “Though, yeah. You would. I meant, uh. That now I have to go to bed alone, with this Packers tragedy on my shoulders. And nobody to comfort me.”

“Aw.” Jay did wish Mike was with him, at least for the next ten minutes, to keep him warm until he dragged himself into the shower. “I’ll be home soon,” he promised, dozy enough post-orgasm to see no reason not to say so.

“You’re never home the way I want you to be,” Mike said, muttering.

That snapped Jay out of his blissful drifting. He opened his eyes and blinked up at the ceiling, listening to Mike’s still-agitated breath. 

“You only love me because I’m terrible for you,” Jay said, without thinking. 

“That’s one reason,” Mike said, like he’d had the same thought, just now. “But it’s sure as shit not the only one.”

Then he hung up, the asshole.

Jay ordered room service and took a shower while he waited for it to arrive. He brought the remainder of his fourth beer with him into the shower and set it on the shampoo nook, taking sips and feeling like he might fall asleep on his feet under the warm water. He imagined Mike lying in bed, feeling sorry for himself. Jay had told him a dozen times to please just find someone else, someone good and normal who would take care of him the way he deserved, but he’d never meant it. He’d taken sadistic pleasure in watching Mike fail to love other people. He knew Mike would revel in knowing no one else had fucked him, if Jay was ever generous enough to tell him. That, or it would break Mike’s spirit once and for all, because Jay had been secretly faithful to him the whole time, and Mike had spent that nickel thinking otherwise.

 _I’m sorry the Packers lost_ , Jay sent, after he’d eaten a soggy room service chicken sandwich and the entire enormous pile of fries that came with it. 

_It was probably my fault, you’re right_ , he sent when Mike didn’t reply.

And then, half an hour later, unable to sleep: 

_So what are the other reasons_

He washed his face, but still felt haunted by the french fries. He went to bed telling himself that he’d do a lot of walking tomorrow, and only checked his phone once more before putting it on the charger for the night. There was nothing from Mike. 

He climbed under the sheets in a fresh t-shirt and boxers, shivering. He loved being in big hotel beds alone. Normally, anyway. He felt a little swallowed up by the perfect dark of the room with the curtains shut, like he might disappear within it, so he got up and opened them. Back in bed and turned toward the window with his head on his pillow, he stared at the view until he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, the whole time listening for a ding from his phone that didn’t come.


	2. Chapter 2

The morning was so bright that Jay thought of fresh snow before he opened his eyes and remembered where he was. The sun drenched hills of Hollywood stretched out before him and seemed to welcome him back to reality when he sat up in bed, blinking slow and gazing out at the day’s potential. His head hurt, but he had all morning to nurse his mild hangover, nowhere to be. 

He checked his phone. There was a new text from Mike, from just twenty minutes ago. It may have been what woke him, as he’d drifted in a half-sleep for a while before registering that brightness and dragging his eyes open. 

_check your email_ was the message. 

Jay’s heart started beating harder. That seemed ominous. He pulled up his email on his phone and had a new one from Mike, who used the same email address he’d had since 2005. The subject line just said Reasons.

“Oh fuck,” Jay said, moaning, remembering. He felt jittery with the need to open this email but also afraid it would ruin his day. Mike had to be goddamn everywhere, even when he was thousands of miles away. Jay had learned this long ago, when he’d tried to banish Mike from Milwaukee. Mike had been ever-present in Jay’s thoughts even more after leaving the state, relentlessly responding to every thought Jay had in a smug, contrary dialogue that Jay couldn’t stop imagining, because he needed to know Mike’s opinion on everything, even when it was the last fucking thing he wanted to hear. 

Jay did research on his phone, and within an hour he was dressed and looking suitable for a day out and about in L.A., on his way to a coffee shop that was supposed to be good. It was crowded, and he had to combat the feeling that the cut of his jeans made it obvious he didn’t belong there, though it was just some coffee shop playing music he’d never heard before. He found an uncomfortable stool at the bar along the wall and ate a yogurt parfait with blueberries, drank an iced latte and tried not to wonder what was in that email. He wanted to delay the emotional responsibility of reading it by placating Mike with a text, but couldn’t think of any potential responses that wouldn’t crush Mike if that email was actually full of reasons Mike loved him, things Jay was afraid to know and so hadn’t read yet. It might also just be a joke, like a bunch of embedded pictures of Jay’s ass.

He decided to withhold even a quick text response until after his visit to the Jim Henson Studio. The trappings of Muppet history would inspire him to say the right thing, maybe. Jay would read Mike’s email after he’d completed his full agenda for the day, when he was mentally prepared for either an actual list or a stupid prank. He didn’t want whichever it was to color his whole day of carefully cultivated alone time, meanwhile. Mike and the Packers had already encroached upon his first full night there. More than encroached, actually: they’d claimed the whole damn thing for themselves, and Jay was already spending way too much time on this trip thinking about Mike. 

The studio tour was a small group thing he’d booked in advance, a somewhat rare opportunity that had been his stated reason for coming out to L.A. It was enjoyable but also made him feel like everything to do with filmmaking did, like he should have tried harder to do it himself. He went to the Broad afterward, because he remembered liking it on a previous trip, but most of the art in the special exhibit felt ostentatious and obvious, and the line for the Infinity Mirror room depressed him. He’d gone to see one of them in Chicago the year before, because his sisters had wanted to. It had been just after the new year and all the Instagramming going on made him feel old and cranky. He’d also hated being in Chicago without Mike, which had taken him by surprise and annoyed him. That his sisters were interrogating him about his ‘relationship’ for much of the day didn’t help.

So the email from Mike was ruining his mood, even unread. He pulled up his inbox on his phone and stared at that word in the subject line again. Reasons. Well, he had asked. He was sweating while waiting in line at the museum cafe, which was a waste of an L.A. lunch but would have to do, because he’d reached the stage of his hangover where he was starving. He ordered a bagel sandwich, though this was officially too much bread within the past twenty-four hours. What he really wanted was a giant soft pretzel coated in salt.

He imagined his sisters sitting with him at the table while he ate, all of them frowning at him with real concern and asking what kind of person doesn’t _immediately_ open an email full of reasons why someone loves them?

One at a time they would ask: Are you afraid it’s just a joke? Afraid to be disappointed? Realizing now that you wanted a real list of reasons more than you thought you did? 

You don’t know Mike, Jay would say, in response to all these questions, and they would protest that of course they did, that they’d known him for twenty years. Mike showing up to the house to pick up Jay had been an event, like a prince from a foreign land coming to take their brother on an adventure. His youngest sister eventually told him that she’d misunderstood his story about meeting Mike at a horror convention and had imagined that Jay had ventured into one of the movies he obsessed over and brought back a boy, sparing him from the carnage.

You’re very cruel to that man, Jay’s mother had said once. 

Why is nobody ever on my side, Jay had wanted to say, when it’s me versus him? He’d also kind of wanted to say, well, it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea for you to have been more cruel to Dad, for example when he was cheating on you, so I don’t really need your advice. What he actually said was, yeah, maybe.

The worst comment he’d ever gotten, because it was the most accurate, was from their mutual friend Jack, who said, you know that corny scene at the end of a kids’ movie when the kid is trying to make his animal friend run away for its own good, and he’s yelling at the poor, confused animal and telling it to get lost, that he hates it, maybe throwing a few rocks in its general direction, but he’s also sobbing because he actually loves it so much? That’s you and Mike. 

“Which one of us is the kid,” Jay had said, giving Jack a look of murderous loathing. Jack just shook his head and changed the subject.

Jay stared at his phone on the table after eating, surprised that Mike hadn’t already sent ten texts demanding to know if he’d read the email yet. He tried to think of what to text, any words that Mike would accept as a good enough excuse for Jay’s delayed reading of the email. Nothing came, so he headed for the museum exit and his rental car, and got back on the freeway.

He ended up at a strip mall movie theater, which was an idiotic waste of what amounted to almost four hours, between the traffic and the movie he saw. It was the latest A24 thing. It was fine. There were just certain times in his life when going to a movie seemed to be the only thing to do. The sun was going down by the time he left the theater, and though he resented it he couldn’t help wishing Mike was with him, so he could talk about why he’d mostly liked the movie but also found it frustrating. 

Sitting in traffic on the way back to his hotel gave him too much time to think. He was starting to feel panicked about the prospect of hurting Mike’s feelings one too many times. So why not just read the email, his eldest sister’s voice asked him. When he got back to his hotel room he called his youngest sister, who loved him the most and gave the worst advice, because she always told him what he wanted to hear.

“I’m in L.A.,” he said when she answered. She always answered his calls. When they were kids she’d had a habit of sneaking out to the living room when he was up late watching scary movies alone in the dark. She would cling to his side and close her eyes during all the gross or intense parts, pulling his sleeve over her face if it got really bad and refusing to leave, as if the evil stuff on the screen would seep out and get him without her there. 

“Are you there for work?” she asked, sounding distracted. 

“Yeah, I’m here on important VCR repair business. No. It’s a vacation. The first one I’ve taken in a long time.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going? I would have come with you!” 

“This is a special kind of trip. Like, I’m trying to talk myself into going to a gay bar right now. I need you to tell me to do that instead of sitting in my hotel room and having a panic attack about Mike.”

“What’d he do? He’s not with you?”

“He didn’t do anything, and no, he’s-- The whole point is that he’s not with me. That nobody is. I’m cosplaying as somebody who was brave enough to move out here twenty years ago.”

“Oh no.” 

“What?”

“Nothing, you just sound so weird. Did Mike get a new girlfriend or something?”

“No! Jesus, not everything I do is a reaction to him doing something worse.” 

“Why are you mad at me?”

“I’m not, sorry. I think I’m having a mid-life crisis. I’ll be forty in, uh. Eight months.” 

“You look great for forty. What are you worried about? I’m not allowed to ask about Mike?”

“No. It can’t always be about him.”

“Okay. So? You’re nervous about going to a bar? You’ll do great! Just be careful.”

“I’m not nervous. I just feel like I waited too long. Like when I walk in there I’ll be like the clueless uncle who shows up to a ten year old’s birthday party with a present for a toddler.” 

“You’ve never done that. You’ve very good at presents.”

“Remember when you thought I’d pulled Mike out of a horror movie?” 

“I didn’t really think that. Or, maybe I did, kinda. It was romantic. He just seemed like someone you’d rescued from something. I thought you didn’t want to talk about him?”

"I don't. Sorry. He sent me this email-- Never mind."

"Do you want me to call him for you?"

"No! God, no. You have Mike's number?"

"He always texts us on our birthdays. But, listen, you're right. Go out and have fun. I want to hear all about how fun an L.A. gay bar is tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay." Jay nodded to himself and went to the bathroom to peer at himself in the mirror, wishing he'd done this four years ago. "Thanks for understanding."

"I'm not sure I do, but if it's Mike-related I probably never will. Just take care of yourself, and don't worry so much. You deserve a nice night out."

Jay tried to keep this in his head like a mantra as he primped himself and headed for the bar ten blocks away that he’d centered this trip around, probably pathetically. He told himself not to expect anything, to just hang out and drink and enjoy being alone, because that was something he still loved, Mike be damned, and that he should under no circumstances start reading that email from Mike until he’d concluded his independant evening in whatever fashion. 

The sun had gone down by the time he got to the bar, but it was still early and the place wasn’t crowded. The interior was as clean and aesthetically pleasing as it had looked online, the decor kind of reminding Jay a particular kind of surreal movie set styling, half bizarre vintage and half hyper-modern. The music wasn’t as good as he’d hoped. 

He ignored his stupidly agitated heart rate and took a seat at the bar, which was white and shiny in a way that made him think of the Genius Bar at the mall back home. The lighting here was much better, dim with red and blue accents that cast a kind of cozy purplish haze over the place. He ordered a Japanese whiskey, double with a water back, though normally he would have asked for rum and Coke. That seemed too midwestern for this place. 

Waiting on his drink and trying to have neither slouchy nor overly self-conscious posture, he could feel someone looking at him. He scanned the bar as subtly as possible and saw two dudes at the end who seemed unimpressed, muttering to each other and staring at him in a shamelessly judgmental way. They were both tall and thin and dressed like it was winter, in slim jackets over sweaters. Jay supposed it technically was winter even in L.A., but it was also like seventy degrees outside. He sucked in his gut and tried to ignore them, grabbing for his drink when it arrived. He was wearing his favorite t-shirt, which featured a Lynch movie quote. This suddenly seemed like a highly idiotic choice.

Miserably sipping whiskey, he imagined what he would be doing if he was at home. He’d be at some bar, probably, because he’d fallen back into the bad habit of going out with Mike after work again the past year. They’d be arguing about something, loud to the point of being slightly rude but ignoring the other patrons, who were used to them and their bullshit anyway. After that, depending on how drunk he got, he’d either go home and watch a movie alone or bring Mike with him and get fucked first. In the case of the latter Mike would fall asleep with his head in Jay’s lap within ten minutes of the movie. Mike would stay over and would make them both late for work in the morning. Jay would spend the whole work day staring into space, half-listening to Mike and telling himself he wouldn’t do it all over again that night. But around five o’clock Mike would hand him a beer and give him a lopsided, hopeful grin, and the process would restart. Much of the past year had been this way. Jay felt like he was regressing. He hated himself for blaming Mike, but it was easier than the alternative.

He checked his phone. No new texts from Mike. The email remained unread in his inbox, the word Reasons starting to feel like an accusation. 

Jay had planned to switch to beer after one hard drink, but he ordered another double whiskey, figuring he might as well get trashed if everyone here was just going to ignore him anyway. Most of the guys he’d dared to give sideways glances were younger than him, and all of them were hot in a carefully designed way. Jay felt like whatever hotness he’d once possessed was accidental and already fading. He didn’t really care, could get by on being cute, but so far this place was just making him feel shitty in the way that he’d feared.

He’d ordered a beer after finishing the second whiskey and checked his phone, sure that Mike would have broken by now and sent a text asking why the fuck Jay hadn’t read his email, but there was nothing, not even a text from one of his sisters. 

“I like your shirt.” 

Jay looked up at the guy who’d said so, wondering if he was being made fun of. But the guy had a friendly look on his face, sweet eyes and a smile that didn’t seem condescending. He was bald and short but handsome in the kind of nonthreatening way that Jay really appreciated at the moment, also closer to Jay’s age than anybody else in the bar had looked so far. 

“Thanks,” Jay said, looking down at the shirt stupidly. 

“Have you ever met him?” the guy asked, gesturing to Jay’s shirt with his beer bottle. 

“Uh-- Who?”

“Lynch.” The guy grinned and shook his head. “Sorry, that was a stupid question. I’m Simon. Can I sit?”

“I’m-- Yeah, go ahead, uh. I’m not saving this seat.” Jay swallowed and made himself calm down. It wasn’t like he’d never been hit on before. But he’d never been hit on while alone at a gay bar. “I’m Jay!” he added hurriedly and too loud, with apology.

“Good to meet you,” Simon said, and they shook hands. Jay wondered if this was his fault-- Had he offered his hand first, and was that not something people did in this situation? Simon didn’t seem bothered. “Hey, good,” he said, nodding to Jay’s beer bottle when the bartender brought it over. “I’m not the only person in here drinking beer.”

“Ha,” Jay said, wondering if Simon could smell the whiskey on his breath. Their barstools were pretty close. “Yeah, um. I’m from the midwest, so.”

“I know,” Simon said, and he grinned.

“You know?”

“Your accent, man.”

“Oh-- Fuck, yeah, of course--”

“I thought you might be one of us even before I heard you talk. I’m from Missouri. I’ve been in L.A. for ten years, but I still seek solace in my own kind. Your accent’s-- Wisconsin?” 

“Yep, ha. Yeah. Milwaukee.” 

“How long have you been in L.A.?”

“Uhh, just about two days, actually. I’m here on vacation.”

“Ah,” Simon said, and Jay tried not to think he looked disappointed, like he’d misjudged this fellow midwesterner as one who’d been smart or talented enough to escape like he had.

“You-- Wait, so. Have _you_ met Lynch?” Jay asked. 

“Funny story,” Simon said, and he drank from his beer after saying so in a way that Jay thought was both cool and maybe kind of arrogant. “His son and I share an agent, and I got to ride in an elevator with them once. His son was on his phone, having an argument with someone, and Lynch reached over and touched his son’s arm and said, really gently, like he sincerely wanted to help, ‘Don’t be a jackass.’ I’m a huge Lynch fan, so I was just standing there trying not to stare, quietly dying of amazement.” 

“Wow,” Jay said, not sure which part of that to react to first. “What’d he smell like?”

Simon laughed hard. Laughing made him look not just regular-guy handsome but also pretty fucking cute. Jay felt himself grinning, maybe also blushing. 

“Cigarettes and coffee,” Simon said. “Of course.”

“Of course,” Jay agreed, nodding.

“Also maybe paint thinner? The guy I was dating at the time berated me for not introducing myself, because I’m a filmmaker, and I guess he thought I was going to have some kind of big break by making an ass of myself and harassing David Lynch in an elevator. And I was just like, even if that was my big chance and I blew it, which it wasn’t, why would I spoil this perfect gift from the universe by inserting myself into that moment? I just wanted to continue observing it in its pure form, you know?”

“Yes,” Jay said, feeling adjacently starstruck. 

“I’ve actually become friends with his son since then, so maybe I’ll meet him properly someday. I try not to go all fanboy and like, grill him about his dad’s stuff. They don’t even see each other that often, so. Now I’m just gossiping, uh. Anyway. What do you do?”

“Oh god,” Jay said, before he could stop himself. “I’m a failed filmmaker, actually. I work in retail, it’s boring. Sorry, I’m gonna be a gross hick about this but, like. Did you say you’re friends with David Lynch’s son?”

“Yes, but it’s way less exciting than it sounds. And you’re way too young to say you’ve failed at anything. Just, you know. If you care about someone random asshole’s opinion.”

Jay was definitely blushing then. They both drank from their beers.

What followed was several hours or more of talking and beers that felt entirely different from the talking and beers that Jay got up to back home, with Mike. The bar got more crowded, then extremely crowded, and the music got louder and louder. Jay and Simon kept their places at the bar with a kind of territorial fierceness that felt like an inside joke and made them laugh hard at all the entitled younger guys who gave them dirty looks or flirted insincerely while trying elbow their way in. Eventually they had to speak directly into each other’s ears to even hear what the other was saying, but they kept their spots there anyway, beaming at each other like this was part of the fun, because it was. They finally ended up standing just to get close enough to be heard.

They talked about movies and moviemaking, industry gossip, what Simon loved and hated about living in L.A., what he missed about the midwest and how maybe the gay bars there were actually better. Jay completely agreed, having no idea what he was talking about and accepting what might have been his fifth beer. When he heard himself talking about Mike he knew he was fucking wasted, but it was the confident kind of weightless drunkenness that just made him sure he should say even more. 

“I just feel really bad,” Jay said, though in the moment he really didn’t. “I think I ruined his life, but he was the cool one, I was the little dork, it never made any sense.”

“Little dork is a valid type,” Simon said. He was grinning like he didn’t mind this thread of conversation. He put his on hand on Jay’s waist, squeezing a little when people jostled them as they approached the bar. Simon’s hands were way too small. He and Jay were the exact same height. 

“We’re the exact same height,” Jay said, beaming. 

“I noticed that. Should we get out of here? This music sucks.”

“Sure!” 

Jay didn’t think about what he was agreeing to until Simon was paying for their drinks. Jay wanted to protest, to at least pay for his own, but it was too late, and during the course of their conversation he’d discovered that he’d seen two of Simon’s movies, one of which was a studio-produced franchise sequel that got a wide release, so the guy had fucking money, so why not. 

“We could walk to dinner somewhere,” Simon said when they were outside, where the temperature had dropped enough that Jay was chilly in his t-shirt, blinking around at the blur of the animated neighborhood they were walking through. The sidewalks were crowded with partiers, loud music spilling from every place they passed. 

“Dinner,” Jay said, catching on slowly. He wasn’t hungry. “Isn’t it like midnight?”

“It’s not quite that late, but I know some good twenty-four hour places.”

“Oh yeah?” Jay laughed and thought of what they had for that back home: Denny’s, basically. “Nah, I’m good. Feels good out here, I mean. It was stuffy in there.”

“It was starting to reek of sweat. That time of night. Can’t be helped. If you want to get an Uber, we could go back to my place. It’s in the hills, not far.”

Jay gave Simon a dopey grin, thinking of his view from the hotel room, those houses in the hills that might as well have been on a television screen last night, they were so far away. Now he could go to one. Maybe Simon would even want him to be the one who did the fucking. Jay had tried it that way with Mike once and it had been a horrible, embarrassing failure. This could be his redemption as a surprise natural at topping.  
  
“Let’s do it,” Jay said, and he laughed when Simon kissed his cheek. 

“You’re really cute,” Simon said, digging out his phone while keeping his eyes on Jay’s face. “I can see why you have a stalker.” 

“Oh, Mike’s not-- Did I call him that?” 

“You said he threatened to follow you out here.” Simon was looking at his phone now. Ordering the Uber? Sure, why not.

“Yeah, I, uh, actually-- He was joking, he wouldn’t--”

Simon was busy with the Uber ordering process, so Jay dug out his phone, too. He felt punched when he saw no new messages from Mike. What the fuck was Mike doing? Screwing around with some lame midwesterner, probably. Ha, well. Jay would finally return the insult! And this midwesterner wasn’t lame. He knew what Lynch smelled like and had successfully made four motion pictures. 

Jay pulled up his text messages just to check and make sure he hadn’t missed one from Mike somehow. The last one from him was from that morning, 8:09am local time.

_check your email_

“Everything okay?” Simon asked. 

“Oh-- Yeah, sorry. It’s, uhh. Work email.” 

Simon raised his eyebrows like maybe he was going to ask what sort of work email from a midwestern VCR repair shop needed attention at near-midnight on the west coast. Then he just smiled and waved to their Uber, which was pulling up.

It was a posh SUV that smelled nice inside, driven by a chubby guy with a nose ring who reminded Jay a little bit of his cousin. How funny would it be if this guy was from the midwest, too? Jay was going to ask, but then Simon reached over and put his hand on Jay’s thigh. 

Jay wasn’t sure what sort of look he had on his face. Surprise, probably, though this should be the least surprising thing ever. 

“I’m really glad I approached you,” Simon said. “I’ve been kinda bitter about trying to meet people lately. And places like that grate on me. But I just had this feeling like I should go out tonight. Like something good was waiting.” 

“Something good,” Jay said, and then he laughed at himself. “Sorry I keep repeating everything you say. But, yeah. Same deal, with me.” 

Was it the same deal? Maybe he was lying. Simon wouldn’t mind. He was rubbing Jay’s leg, squeezing, and staring at him with intent. Jay tried to like it but couldn’t help flinching away.

“Sorry,” he said, nodding his head toward the driver, as if his presence was the actual reason Jay was starting to freak out. “I, uh. You know us midwesterners. And, um. Public affection.” 

“Oh, sure.” Simon smiled and rested his hand on the seat between them. “I can wait. Are you sure you’re not hungry?”

He asked this as if to suggest that this was Jay’s last chance to eat something before they had sex till sundown at Simon’s mansion. 

Or maybe Jay was just imagining things. Either way, his impulse to freak out was elevating toward real panic. His heart was pounding and the car was moving too fast, swerving through traffic. 

“Um,” Jay said. His phone was still in his hand. “No, I. I don’t want anything. Any food, I mean.” 

Simon smirked and nodded, staring at Jay like he was picturing what he was going to do to him when they were alone. Jay was suddenly sure that Simon would not ask him to top.

Oh no, Jay thought, his stomach lurching. He’d never done this before, so what the hell had made him think he could suddenly do it now? Was he drunk enough to just go with it? He was starting to feel like: nope. Simon’s movies were disturbing horror pictures, which back at the bar had made him seem so perfect for this, for Jay. Now Jay was thinking the guy might be a sadist with a sex dungeon in his mansion. He could lock Jay up there and throw away the key. No one in L.A. would care to look for him. Nobody here knew him. 

“I need to check something,” Jay said, lifting his phone. “Sorry, just. My sister, uh. She just had a baby.” Where did that lie come from? He should never drink whiskey. “I got a text from her, so, just a sec--”

“Go for it,” Simon said, pulling his phone out. “I can check my own fires in the meantime.”

Jay’s hand was sweating so much that his first attempt to fingerprint-unlock his phone didn’t work. He wiped his fingers on his t-shirt and tried again. The SUV was hurtling away from the party scene on the main drag, turning down darker side streets. Jay’s hand shook as he pulled up his inbox and opened Mike’s email. He felt like he was about to die, maybe. Like this was his last chance to ever know why Mike was so determined to love him.

> Reasons
> 
> In no particular order:
> 
> -You always smell good  
>  -You seem to disdain everyone in the world except me and your sisters  
>  -You also disdain me but only when I deserve it  
>  -Green eyes, blond hair, overbite. Short. Everything about how you look. It's not stuff I even care about on other people. It's that you have all this stuff. That's what makes it hot, it's your stuff.  
>  -You think I'm funny, and sometimes you laugh at my jokes just to be nice (I think), but not every time.  
>  -You have a lot of pent up rage that you're in denial about. I can relate and also find this hot for some reason.  
>  -You never let people see you with your guard down or lose control of your emotions. This means you have some kind of secret self that no one has ever seen, not even me. And I'm obsessed with him. And I think the closest anyone will ever get to him is when they're balls deep in you and making you go crazy on their dick, so I have that at least.  
>  -You like the dumbest shit sometimes, and because I'm in love with you the stuff you like seems less dumb than it should and also infuriates me, because anything you care about feels like competition for your affection, and I want all of it for myself. And yes I'm including movies, inanimate objects, music, enamel pins, healthy cereals, all of it.  
> 

“Everything okay with her?” Simon asked, friendly-like and normal-seeming again. He probably wasn’t some kind of serial predator. Just a guy who wanted to have sex.

Jay didn’t look up from his phone, just nodded and kept reading.

> -All your weird little tics: that you bite your fingernails but only when you think nobody's looking, how you rub your thumb over your arm when you're nervous, still curl your tongue over your front teeth sometimes like you forgot that you fixed them, put your little hands on your cheeks when you're being pretend shocked and over your mouth when you're actually shocked  
>  -Everything about your mouth and your voice. I just want to crawl in there and live on your tongue.  
>  -That you don't get jealous, even though I sometimes think I wish you would. That you know nobody can take me from you.   
>  -You're mean as fuck, meaner than me even, and I love it.  
>  -But you're also so sweet sometimes.  
>  -The way you look up at me when we're standing face to face and you either feel guilty about something or want me to feel sorry for you, this particular sort of sad pleading look in your eyes, it's fucking adorable, almost knocks me over every time.  
>  -You have enviable willpower.  
>  -But you also go hard when you want to and god there's nothing better than when you're up for getting wasted with me or when you just want me to fuck you all day long cause you can't get enough.  
>  -How you look when you're all fucked out and sweaty and half asleep, curled up next to me and still breathing a little bit hard. That's the best shit in the world.  
>  -Your hair when it's all fucked up.  
>  -All your awful haircuts throughout the years. How there is nothing you can do to that hair that doesn't just look fucking cute to me.  
> 

Jay made himself look up, not at Simon but at the back of the empty passenger seat in front of him. He was breathing too fast, kind of felt like he was going to puke. The world seemed to tilt around dangerously when he looked out the window. They were leaving the commercial district altogether, headed for the hills. He needed to stop this. From the corner of his eye he could see Simon casually reading from his phone. He looked back down at Mike’s list, though he felt like reading more of it might kill him.

> -Every time in the history of the world that you've bitten your bottom lip because you were thinking or nervous or feeling insecure or smug or devious. Even before I knew you.  
>  -Your massive, melodramatic family and how they all seem to want you to marry me.  
>  -You're weirdly loyal. Weirdly because I don't even think you want to be. But if you love someone you'll do anything for them. Which is why you only love like four people, I think. Because you know this about yourself.  
>  -Your whole carefully curated selection of things you care deeply about, and how you don't even pretend to give half a shit about anything else.  
>  -You like being alone. I know you think I hate this about you, and sometimes I definitely do, but I also love that you don't need anyone, even when it makes me sad.  
>  -How you laugh it off when I'm mean to you but also get red-faced because you're embarrassed by experiencing an emotion and desperate to hide it. Sorry.  
>  -That if I killed someone you'd help me get rid of the body.  
>  -But you also can't stand seeing real people get hurt.  
>  -That you bullied your parents into letting you grow up too fast.  
>  -But you were still a virgin when we met.  
>  -That you only willingly ate like four childish foods until you were 25.  
>  -When you think you're the first person to discover some kind of "exotic" food that I've been eating since I was a kid in Chicago.  
>  -You're a little bit of a hick, Jay.  
>  -And it's fucking cute when you don't realize this.  
> 

Jay snarled down at the screen, then laughed. He felt like he might as well be sitting in Mike’s lap, like Mike was wrapped around him and keeping him temporarily safe in this Uber that he should not be in, which was making its way toward some stranger’s house. 

“Don’t take Olympic,” Simon said, speaking to the driver, and Jay looked over at him. Simon gave Jay a glance like he was reassessing this situation, too. 

“I don’t feel good suddenly,” Jay said, his stomach pinching up again.

“Can you put down the windows?” Simon said, and the driver did so, cracking the back windows enough to let the rush of night air into the car. 

Jay wanted to say he had to get out of the car entirely, to leave, but he couldn’t make his voice work. He turned back to his phone, bringing it close to his face in the dark backseat.

> -How obsessively neat and detail-oriented you are, even when it drives me insane.  
>  -That you spend every Sunday cleaning your apartment and doing laundry and you LIKE it, like you almost look forward to it?? It's like your little religious ceremony and it's so fucking weird, I love it.  
>  -You have the dorkiest sunglasses, everything else in your wardrobe got mostly updated over the years but those are still stuck in the 90s, it's great.  
>  -You really listen when people talk, even if they're morons.  
>  -Your eyes light up when you can tell someone really understands what you're talking about.  
>  -Nobody makes that happen more than me.  
>  -You went to a John Carpenter concert by yourself and sat in the front row and refused to let me come with you because you thought I'd ruin it by being cynical and you were right.  
>  -You have a better dry sarcastic deadpan delivery than me, makes me jealous.  
>  -You're the only person I know who's smarter than me.  
>  -You do all the talking for me when I can't deal with people or feel like shit.  
>  -The hypersensitive nipples (which I still contend would be the name of our band, if we were musicians and if you didn't forbid it even in theory)  
>  -How you do this full body convulsing thing when you laugh, especially if you're trying not to be too loud or rude  
>  -That you have terrible nightmares and refuse to tell me what they're about but will let me hold you after you wake up  
>  -That time you punched me in your sleep and felt really bad about it  
>  -You don't trust anybody who isn't blood related to you, except me  
>  -Those times when I wake up at your place at three in the morning and you're cleaning your kitchen or watching TMC and eating Oreos  
>  -What an asshole you are to people who try to hit on you at bars  
>  -Usually without even realizing it  
> 

“Oh,” Jay said, accidentally out loud, gut-punched by that.

“Seems like maybe you got some bad news?” Simon said, staring at him now. He’d put his phone away. 

“No, it’s-- Good news.” Jay swallowed and looked out the window. Where were they? He had to get out of this car. 

“Is the fresh air helping?” Simon asked.

“Helping? Oh-- No, yeah-- I--”

Jay let his mouth hang open and read more of Mike’s email, unable to stop. The list just kept going. 

> -That you once almost got in a drunken fistfight defending David Byrne's honor  
>  -I don't know if you remember this but once when we were drunk I said Kurt Russell character lines while fucking you and you loved it  
>  -The way you bite your lip when you're jacking it (different from lip biting mentioned above)  
>  -When I find one of your blond eyelashes on my pillow  
>  -When you wear my sweatshirts and they're ridiculously huge on you  
>  -The way your little hands peek out from said sweatshirt sleeves  
>  -That time when you were sick and you let me hold you in my lap on the sofa at your place because you felt so miserable  
>  -How much you hate being sick and act like it's the end of the world  
>  -Don't take this the wrong way but I don't think I've ever met anyone who genuinely loves sucking cock as much as you, it's fucking heartwarming  
>  -On a related note: how yours fits perfectly in my mouth  
>  -You're extremely competitive and stubborn  
>  -How you love final girls so much, like you lived through it with them  
>  -How sincerely mad you got when I tried to convince you we were both porn actresses in a past life that one time when we were high  
>  -How much typing this up is making me miss you, even though you've barely been gone a day  
>  -How I could easily make this an embarrassing 100 page document or longer  
>  -How even reading this much will embarrass the shit out of you  
>  -I can picture how red your face is right now, all the way up to your hairline  
> 

Jay lifted his hand to touch his hot cheek. He felt like some kind of window was closing, but couldn’t make himself tell the driver to stop, because he couldn’t stop reading the reasons.

> -I remember what it was like to live without you and it was so lonely  
>  -Not when I moved away but before I knew you  
>  -Even missing you nonstop was better than that, because at least missing you meant I knew you were real  
>  -How much you hate it when I criticize you but pretend not to care  
>  -How you pretend not to care about cuddling after sex but push back against me like you’re reveling in it when I'm spooning you and you think I'm asleep  
>  -How you've been the same level of horny for every iteration of me as the years go by  
>  -And I feel the same about you  
>  -Which probably means we'll still want to fuck when we're disgustingly old!  
>  -How I think you want to spend the rest of your life with me  
>  -Even if we maintain separate residences  
>  -And sleep with other old people (ew)  
>  -I think you really wish you could make me happy.  
>  -But you respect me enough not to pretend you want what I want.  
>  -And yes, you fuck, the reason you mentioned is the last one on this list, but not the biggest one. Because I can't ever ever ever have you, no matter how many times it feels like I do, for a minute or a day or a weekend, and it drives me fucking crazy and makes me want you more, yes, you're right, good job.  
> 

“I have to go,” Jay said, because that was the end of the email and they were crossing under the freeway, heading into a residential area.

“Go?” Simon said. “Where, uh, do you need--” 

“I just have to get out, can you stop?”

“Stop here?” the driver said, peering back at Jay uncertainly.

“Hang on,” Simon said. “Um, do you need-- Are you okay?”

“No, I have to go, please, I’m sorry, let me out here.” Jay put his phone down and gave Simon the most sincerely apologetic look he could manage. “Sorry, something happened and I have to go.” 

“What’s-- Well, okay, but there’s no reason to get out on the side of the road?”

Just hearing him say the word _reason_ made Jay grab for the door handle.

“Whoa, hang on!” the driver said, slamming on the brakes when Jay opened the door. Other drivers started honking.

“Dude,” Simon said, frowning when Jay gave him a guilty look. “What’s wrong with you, let us drop you somewhere--”

“Nope, gotta go, sorry, nice to meet you, say hi to Lynch for me.”

Jay sort of fell out of the car, steadied himself against the side and made a break for it, running to the side of the road to avoid being struck by another vehicle. Horns blared until the SUV pulled forward, taking Simon and Jay’s almost terrible decision with it. Jay didn’t look back, afraid that he’d be cursed or something if he did, just hurried along the side of the road in the direction from which they’d come. He crossed his arms over his chest, feeling shivery and shaken up but okay, because he’d made it out just in time, and Mike loved him, and now he knew why.

Walking after being in the car made him realize how dangerously drunk he was, but there was an accompanying dumb optimism that came with this state of being, so he just kept walking along the side of the road, not knowing where he was going, except that he was going back, generally: back toward the bar, back to his hotel room, and then back to Milwaukee, to Mike. 

He had to walk back under the freeway underpass, and as he did he heard voices in the dark. Stupid drunk, he stopped to look and felt eyes on him, saw the lit end of a cigarette or a pipe flaming in the darkness up near the underside of the road. 

“‘Ey, blondie!” someone rough-voiced shouted, and someone else shrieked with laughter.

Jay started walking fast, then ran for a while without looking back. He took a left onto a side street, thinking he remembered having come this way in the car, then decided that was a bad idea and started to double back. Someone at the intersection he’d veered away from was standing near a bus stop and staring at him, so he turned and walked in the other direction again, feeling like he was in a fucking Lynch movie. Linear space no longer made sense. He was sweaty and his stomach hurt. He didn’t stop moving until he found himself in a Walgreen’s parking lot. Thinking himself safe enough there, he reached for his phone, ready to call his own Uber. If he tried walking any farther he’d just get lost. 

“Wait,” he said, patting his pockets a second time and finding no phone. “Wait-- No, oh. No, no, no-- Fuck!”

He whirled around, as if Simon would be there in the SUV, smiling from the window and holding out Jay’s phone. But Simon and the SUV were long gone, elsewhere, and Jay’s phone had gone with them. He’d put it on the seat. It must have slid onto the floor when the driver braked hard to let Jay out. 

His first thought was that he had to call Mike, which he couldn’t do, because he had no phone. Even if he could find a working pay phone, which he was pretty sure he couldn’t, and had change for a call, which he didn’t, he didn’t know Mike’s cell number. It was newish and had always been programmed into Jay’s phone, never dialed directly. 

For a while Jay just stood there in the Walgreen’s parking lot, feeling both panicked and defeated. He told himself to calm down. He still had his wallet. He could have someone call a taxi for him. The Walgreen’s was right there, brightly lit. The phone could be recovered, somehow. He’d track it, call Uber customer service from the hotel, something. 

Running alongside these sobering thoughts was a drunken sense of doom, like he’d just thrown Mike himself away by leaving him in an Uber, all those reasons erased by Jay’s carelessness. 

Though he was sure it was past midnight by then, there was somehow a line at the only open register in the Walgreen’s, and everyone standing in it looked demented, also dirty. An old Elton John song was playing on the store’s overhead speakers. It was a cheesy one from the 80s that Mike would never listen to voluntarily, but it still made Jay think of him and feel newly guilty about everything. Everyone waiting at the register was silent in a menacing way, several of them turning to look at Jay at the back of the line as if this was a very exclusive private club and he had some nerve walking in uninvited. Other than the Elton song, the only sound in the place was the slow beep of the register as the clerk, a shriveled old man in a red apron, dragged items across the scanner. 

Jay picked up a packet of mints, thinking he might be required to purchase something in exchange for asking the clerk to call a cab for him. Maybe he’d just have to give the clerk cash directly for the favor. He checked his wallet for bills and cursed when he remembered he had none. That hipster cafe had surprised him by only accepting cash, which had cleaned out his supply. He craned his neck in search of an ATM. This place had to have one.

The line moved infinitesimally. Jay felt like he’d been waiting for twenty minutes by the time the guy at the front finally left with his plastic bag full of crap. The next weirdo stepped up and dumped dozens of packs of batteries onto the counter. The clerk sighed. Jay couldn’t stop reaching for the phone that was no longer in his pocket, wanting to check for messages or just text Mike, desperate to say anything to him after avoiding the opportunity all day long. 

You wanted to be alone, a cruel thing inside him said. Now you really fucking are, enjoy it.

When it was finally his turn, he felt like he’d turned into one of the startling rejects who had eyed him like he didn’t belong there when he walked in. He remembered his drunkenness only when he tried to articulate his problem and the clerk stared at him like he was insane.

“Phone is for staff only,” the old man said. “Customers can’t use it.”

“No, I don’t need-- I lost my phone, I just need a cab, I need someone to call a cab for me--”

“We don’t do that here,” the old man said, looking at Jay with disgust. 

“Please, I really need-- Um, I can give you some cash, if there’s an ATM--”

“Sir, you are intoxicated,” the clerk said, as if Jay didn’t know. “I can smell it. You can purchase that item or leave, please.”

Jay stared down at the mints, struck dumb by a sense that he should be reacting in some way that wasn’t coming to mind in his current state.

“I just-- Okay, but do you know where I can get a taxi, ah, around here, or--”

“Sir, please pay for those or leave, or I will have to involve the authorities.” 

Jay turned to the person behind him in line, ready to ask to use their cell phone, but she was an unhinged looking woman with mean eyes, so he stepped aside to let her place a bottle of Gatorade and a huge package of gauze bandages on the counter. Jay put the mints down so the old man would see he wasn’t stealing them. He stood there for a minute longer, trying to come up with a plan. His mouth was dry and he was sweaty. When he finally left the store, he caught sight of his reflection in the sliding door as it opened for him. He looked like shit, like somebody who might need the cops called on him for harassing a store clerk.

For a while he stood on the side of the road near the Walgreens, scanning the passing cars for any sign of an oncoming taxi. There was nothing, so he started walking in a direction that may or may not have been the one he wanted to be headed in. He felt like he’d lost a limb. Like he would never be home again. Like he’d missed his twenty-year window to accept that the thing he most wanted could not be destroyed under any circumstances, and therefore it could not turn around and destroy him.

His legs got tired, and the panicked sweat dried on his skin. The night started to feel unfairly cold, and nothing that he walked past was open. Somewhere there were bars, and taxis, but he could not find them. No ATMs or pay phones appeared from the grim darkness to give him a shot at figuring out what to do with his debit card, which felt like all he had left in the world. Several cars slowed down so their drivers could get a better look at him, and when he didn’t make eye contact they sped away again. He sat on a bus stop bench and tried not to start crying like an idiot. 

He put his head in his hands and tortured himself by trying to imagine what would have happened if he’d gone back to Simon’s mansion in the hills. Probably not grisly murder in a sex dungeon. Probably just something awkward and uncomfortable that he would have instantly regretted. Why was he like this? Because he was in love with Mike, and had been since that night at the horror convention when they stayed up talking after Jay’s friend from high school passed out in the hotel room’s other double bed. Jay had always loved hotel rooms. They felt like magical places where anything could happen, where a person’s whole life could change. Mike was to blame for that, like everything. Jay wanted to write down his reasons. He was blinking back tears, so drunk, completely alone. 

When one of the same cars that had slowed down to observe him returned, he wrenched himself from his pity party and walked away as quickly as he could without breaking into a full run. Everything he was walking past was a closed restaurant, and he could see the glow of a McDonald’s up ahead in the distance, but wasn’t confident that it would be open so late. He started to half-jog, imagining that fully utilizing the next few minutes might determine the course of the rest of his life. The car that was trailing him changed lanes, moving closer. He thought of what Mike said about the Zodiac Killer still being at large and almost laughed. Maybe he’d run away from a horror movie director only to end up in an actual horror movie scenario. That would be just perfect, a fitting end. 

He got close enough to see there were still people inside the McDonalds, including a table of customers, and he bolted forward as if this fast food chain restaurant would save his life, because maybe it would. When he tugged on the door and it opened for him he laughed like a lunatic and hurtled inside. He turned to see if the car that had been following him would pull into the parking lot, and exhaled with shaky relief when he saw it driving away instead.

“Look at this guy,” someone said, and Jay turned to see the table with the restaurant’s only remaining customers, all four of them staring at him and snickering. Based on their attire and the unapologetic way they jeered at him, his first impression was that they were sex workers on break. 

“Who’s chasing you, baby?” one of them asked as he walked past, toward the counter.

“Probably Arlo,” another said. “I just saw his car go by.”

“Goddamn!”

Jay ignored them, but could already see that the staff behind the counter would want even less to do with his bullshit than the Walgreen’s clerk had. Nobody was at the register, and the few staff members in back looked like they were in the process of shutting the kitchen down. A young woman who was mopping the floor in front of the counter gave Jay a look that warned him not to ask for so much as a ketchup packet. 

“They’re closed, honey,” someone at the table of four said. 

“Then why’s the door open,” Jay asked, turning back to them and pointing at it stupidly.

They all fell out laughing in response, as if Jay had tripped into their inside joke. 

Jay felt his eyes well up in response. He had the impulse to ask if he was dreaming. Suddenly the random encounter with someone who knew David Lynch’s son made sense, maybe. It was the kind of shit someone would say in a bad dream that would hold Jay in its cold, squeezing arms for what felt like weeks before he could fight his way out of it.

“Oh, here, poor thing!” Everyone at the table of maybe sex workers rearranged themselves to make room for him. They were sharing a pile of fries and someone had a half-empty bottle of bourbon right there on the table. Open soda cups seemed to suggest they were mixing drinks while enjoying their fries. “Come sit,” they said, all four of them suddenly beckoning him over with enthusiasm, patting the empty space on the end of the booth that they’d made for him. “Have some french fries. Poor baby. Where’s your jacket?”

“I lost my phone,” Jay said, and he sat, sniffling. “I need a taxi.” 

“Call Duncan,” someone said, while someone else rubbed Jay’s back. It didn’t feel too bad, better than having his leg rubbed in the Uber, and he ate the french fry that was handed to him. “We know this cab driver, he’s always working this time of night. Where are you staying?”

“The W Hotel,” Jay said, “In Hollywood.”

This made them all laugh uproariously again, but it didn’t feel cruel this time. Jay felt himself smiling. He wiped at his eyes and ate another french fry when someone held it up near his mouth. He realized with a sudden, consuming relief that this had been the experience he was actually seeking when he came to L.A. He’d had vague fantasies about being a sex worker ever since watching Kids in the Hall in middle school. It was something to do with his attraction to Dave Foley in drag, but also deeper than that. Maybe this was where he belonged now, having forsaken the safety of the midwest and that message in a bottle on his lost phone.

“What the fuck is that accent?” someone at the table asked. 

“Wisconsin,” Jay said, and when they all laughed hard again, he beamed. This was the pinnacle of his hypothetical comedy career in L.A. He was killing it. 

He drank from one of their paper cups full of soda and bourbon while waiting for the taxi to arrive. It tasted enough like rum and Coke that he was comforted. When the cab pulled up outside, they were browsing Tinder and snarking on people’s profiles, inviting Jay’s input in a way that made him feel loved in a ephemeral but important way. He wasn’t ready to leave, but he made himself get up before he could drink any more of their booze. He had a lipstick print on his cheek when he got into the cab and blearily observed his reflection in the backseat window, though he could only remember Simon kissing him there.

“I was supposed to do this twenty years ago,” he told the driver, who seemed to be a legit cabbie with a meter that was running as they pulled away from the McDonalds. 

“Do what?” the cabbie said, sounding disinterested. 

“Nothing, sorry. Do you take debit cards?”

“Sure do.”

Jay put his head against the window and watched the passing scenery, relieved. Everything would be fine. His t-shirt said so, even. Maybe that was why he’d worn it, like armor. He had been saved by some angel-type, Lynchian apparitions who glittered and glowed in his already fuzzy memory. The taste of their french fries and cheap booze was still on his tongue, protecting him. He couldn’t wait to tell Mike, and moaned under his breath when he caught himself imagining that Mike would be there when he got where he was going. He wouldn’t, though. Mike was still far away. 

It was a short cab ride, Jay’s debit card functioned as payment as promised, and the hotel lobby was so bright when he walked inside, trying to make himself as presentable as possible as he headed for the front desk. He’d wiped the lipstick off his cheek, at least. He should have bought those fucking mints at Walgreen’s.

The clerk at the front desk was a tiny woman with black hair, and she gave Jay such a genuine smile, as if she was truly happy to see him, that his eyes started burning again and his voice shook while he tried to explain that he needed her help tracking a lost iPhone that he’d left in an Uber. 

“Of course!” she said, warmly, as if it happened all the time. Jay supposed it probably did.

She called his phone for him, and on the third try, after she’d tracked it for him on her computer and found it had traveled to Santa Monica, the Uber driver answered. He said he would bring Jay’s phone to the hotel after he was done with his rides for the night, or maybe in the morning. Jay supposed that was all they could ask of him, also was starting to fall asleep at the concierge desk with his chin in his hand. 

“We’ll bring your phone up to your room as soon as we have it,” the tiny black-haired woman said, helping Jay walk toward the elevator. “You probably want to get some rest in the meantime?” she suggested, patting his arm. 

“Yes,” Jay said, wanting to kiss her: gently, on the cheek. “You remind me of my sister,” he said. “My favorite sister,” he added, so she’d know this was a good thing.

“Aww!” she said, smiling. He was in the elevator, suddenly. She pressed the button for the 8th floor for him and stepped out. “You’ll know as soon as we have your phone, I promise.” 

This sounded to Jay like some kind of coded prophecy. He nodded gravely, as if he understood.

“Fantastic,” he said, barely stopping himself from saying he loved her. “Thank you, thank you,” he said instead. He wanted to say it to the whole city, including poor Simon who went home alone, probably newly bitter. He even wanted to thank the bums who’d shouted at him from the underpass. 

“You are so welcome,” the hotel clerk said, and when she winked at him as the elevator doors slid shut Jay was pretty sure he really was in a Lynch movie, and was okay with it, even if it meant he was about to die. 

Except he couldn’t die yet, he thought, staring at his barely recognizable self in the mirrored elevator walls. He had to go home and tell Mike his reasons first.

He woke up in his hotel room bed, still dressed, though he’d managed to remove his shoes. He was shivering, lying on top of the neatly made bedsheets. His head felt like a jack-o-lantern that had just had all its guts scraped out and a few jagged pieces carved off its face, and his stomach wasn’t much better. 

He rolled onto his back, groaning. The curtains were open, allowing too much light inside. He didn’t want sunshine at the moment. He wanted to be bundled under several layers of blankets on a frigid midwestern morning, with snow coming down outside and Mike wrapped around him, kissing his face to wake up him for sex or just to comfort him through his hangover. 

Thinking of Mike made him remember his missing phone, and the details of the previous evening began to come back to him, blurry in places and too clear in others, like little stabs. He sobbed dryly when he sat up, wincing and hating his past self for making whiskey and bourbon choices and for neglecting to eat any dinner, though he supposed it could have gone much worse. He deserved to feel this shitty, just for ignoring Mike’s email until the last possible moment when he could use it as a parachute. 

The red light on the phone in the room was blinking. He picked it up the corded receiver and struggled with the buttons on the console for a few minutes before figuring out how to listen to a message from the front desk that had been left hours ago. According to the clock on the bedside table, it was after one o’clock in the afternoon. The message told him his phone was waiting for him down at reception. 

He could have asked someone to bring it up, but he felt almost morally obligated to go and get it his goddamn self, as soon as possible. He splashed water on his face in the bathroom, then knelt down to try and get sick into the toilet when doing so made him certain he was going to puke. This certainty faded, but the nausea persisted. He couldn’t drink like he used to. He had to get his shit together. Marshaling the strength to leave his room and get into the elevator took almost half an hour. 

The lobby was busy. It was a Wednesday, nearing the standard check-in time. Jay would fly home the following day, and though he was ready to be back, he was glad to have twenty-four hours before he’d have to go through airport security and get on a plane. Just walking up to the counter and waiting in line to ask someone about his phone felt like it might kill him, but the sight of his phone was like being reunited with a friend, and he hugged it against his chest on the elevator ride up. 

He had only one new message, a text from his youngest sister.

_So, how was it? Hope you had fun, love you!_

Jay gave her a reply saying he did, more details later, love you too. He read the Reasons email from Mike again, just to confirm he hadn’t hallucinated it in some kind of sexual panic fugue state. The reasons were all still there. Jay read them a third time, drank several glasses of water slowly while sitting in bed in his boxers and t-shirt, and called Mike around two-thirty, local time. It would be almost time to close up the VCR repair shop, back home.

Mike didn’t answer. Jay hung up and called again. Again, he got Mike’s voicemail. This time he cleared his throat and spoke after the tone. 

“Hey, um. Sorry I’ve been out of touch. I lost my phone. Left it in an Uber. Long story. Uhh. I got your-- Can you call me? Okay, um. Talk to you later. Bye.”

He waited a few minutes, ate some ten dollar trail mix from the room’s mini bar, drank a tiny carton of apple juice that probably cost roughly the same, and then sent Mike a text. 

_Did you get my voicemail?_

_You wouldn’t believe the night I had._

_It involves David Lynch, in multi-dimensional ways._

_You okay?_

Jay’s heart was aching by three o’clock, replacing the headache and stomachache that had by then faded to manageable discomfort. What if Mike wasn’t just mad at him but actually not okay? What if he’d had too much to drink and hit his head on something in his apartment, what if he was bleeding out on the floor? Jay tried calling the VCR repair shop, though it was probably too late to catch Mike, even if he was fine. He skipped out on the end of their shift regularly. 

“Lightning Fast VCR Repair, this is Mike, how can I help you?”

The bland familiarity of this shook Jay even more than hearing Mike’s voice when he’d expected to just get the shop’s old answering machine. He hung up, heart pounding.

So there was his confirmation that Mike was deliberately avoiding his calls, unless by some strange coincidence Mike had lost his cell phone, too. They had an old-fashioned phone at the shop, which didn’t show who was calling, which was the only reason Mike had answered. He was brooding, maybe finally hurt in some irreversible way, because Jay had taken too long to respond to the most important message Mike had ever sent him. 

Jay took a long shower and put on a t-shirt and his swim shorts when he got out, needing to leave the room but unwilling to go far. He went up to the rooftop pool, which was crowded in a way that annoyed him, mostly with people mugging on the sidelines. He didn’t care about them, or who might be looking at him and judging his midwinter pastiness. He got in the pool and floated on his back, so that his ears filled with water that muffled the sound of people mingling and music floating over from the bar area. The sky overhead was characterless, except for the haze of smog that he couldn’t really see from this vantage point. He imagined he could feel it, and that the sun from behind it was softer on his skin. The sensation of a fading hangover was making him feel cozy with a kind of growing acceptance that everything would be okay, eventually. 

He checked his phone when he got back to the room. There was nothing from Mike. He wanted to respond to Mike’s email with a list of his own reasons, but he still felt ill and weak, like he’d flub it if he tried to write something deservedly spectacular right now. He had a seven o’clock reservation for one at Majordomo, and his appetite was returning with force. Maybe he would write to Mike after eating, when he had his strength back.

He took Uber to the restaurant, clutching his phone in a death grip the entire way there. His seat was at the bar, which he was used to. Going out alone usually meant a barstool, even at the fanciest restaurants. Not that he normally went to fancy restaurants. He took pictures of his food, not caring that it was tacky and touristy and maybe even a thing that only old people did anymore. He had two beers, talked with the chatty bartender who might have been flirting with him but wasn’t his type at all, because apparently nobody but Mike really was, and spent almost two hundred bucks after tip. Mike would have hated that place, he thought, holding his phone tight again on the Uber trip back to the hotel. Jay had mostly liked it, but would have shrugged one shoulder and conceded that it was a little obnoxious and overpriced, if Mike was there. 

Back in his hotel room, stretched out in bed, he played with his phone until he couldn’t take it anymore and was texting Mike again.

_I guess you’re ignoring my messages_

_Look I know I’m a piece of shit but I really did lose my phone_

_Though I was acting shitty before that. Admittedly._

_For like 20 years._

_I miss you._

_Are you still gonna pick me up at the airport tomorrow or…?_

_I could get an Uber if you’d rather not lay eyes on me ever again but you have my coat_

Mike’s only reply came an hour later, when Jay was drifting off and watching TV with increasingly heavy eyelids. He grabbed for the phone, bolting awake when he heard the text come in.

_you’re not a piece of shit jay_

Jay thought of pressing it by asking again if Mike would be there tomorrow. Mike had dropped Jay off at the airport after work on the day he left, and had walked inside with him so he could take Jay’s heavy winter coat, so that Jay wouldn’t have to lug the thing onto the plane and around L.A., where he wouldn’t need it. The understanding had been that Mike would pick Jay up when he returned, and would bring Jay’s coat with him when he did. 

Jay didn’t know how to reply to Mike saying that he wasn’t a piece of shit. It seemed weirdly tender, like a bruised and reluctant love confession. Jay was so bad at this. He just wanted everything Mike had and to keep all his own stuff, too. Only maybe he was getting a little tired of his own stuff. Maybe he’d overvalued it a bit.

 _How was work today?_ Jay sent, wincing when he was sure that was the wrong thing. 

Mike took a long time to respond. Jay fell asleep, and woke up at three in the morning feeling panicked. He checked his phone, half-remembering that he was waiting for Mike’s reply, which had come hours ago:

_I don’t want to talk about it_

Jay snorted and hugged the phone against his chest as if it was a little piece of Mike’s soul that he’d taken with him, like his discreet bottle of travel lube, just in case he needed it. He fell asleep again, curled around the phone like it was his heat source.


	3. Chapter 3

Jay had terrible dreams, most of which involved being chased down a dark street by some unseen, relentless presence. When he woke up it was almost ten in the morning and he’d slept through the wake up call he’d scheduled and his phone alarm, lost in some twisted hellscape that had him soaked in a now-cold sweat. Since childhood his dreams had felt like places he was taken by things that held claims on him, physically exhausting and real to him after he woke, even as he rapidly forgot the details. _A Nightmare on Elm Street_ had been cathartic for him for this reason. He’d never been able to explain this to anyone properly, himself included. He put on the clothes he’d worn the day before, packed in a hurry and left the room in a near run, worried he wouldn’t make it through L.A. traffic, the rental car return, and airport security before his one o’clock flight home. 

He felt like he was in a different sort of bad dream, cursing the traffic and running to the security checkpoint after dropping off the car, sweaty again. By the time he got to the gate they were on the last call for boarding, and he was breathless as he fell into his seat on the plane, not quite relieved yet. He’d wanted to write a big email full of reasons for Mike before taking off, while waiting in the terminal. The flight attendants were already calling for all phones to be in airplane mode as he buckled his seatbelt with shaking hands. 

After takeoff, he asked for an orange juice from the drink cart and pulled up his email inbox in offline mode. He could still write a draft during the three and a half hour flight, but maybe it would be too late if he sent it when they landed. Mike might not be there waiting for him with his coat, or with anything left to give him after Jay had asked for this big thing, gotten it, and given nothing in return. But he was giving something now, would give it to Mike even it was too late. He sighed and started typing with his thumbs.

> I'm on a plane right now and will send this to you when I land. I wish I’d sent it sooner. I didn’t want to do it hastily.
> 
> Mine's going to be sort of chronological, okay? Okay.
> 
> -Basically from the moment you started muttering jerk comments about those panel presenters in my ear I've never wanted you to stop talking to me.  
>  -That has never been true of anyone else. I usually can't wait for people to shut up and let me talk.  
>  -You also actually listen to me.  
>  -Even if I've just interrupted you and I can tell you're sulking about it.  
>  -You remember everything I say to an annoying degree.   
>  -Even while forgetting major details of your own life, which I have to remind you about.  
>  -Which I sometimes think is an act? Or a kind of test to see if I remember correctly. Because you always seem pleased when I do.  
>  -I love making you happy. Especially making you laugh but also just doing everything you ask me to. I don't always like this about myself. But there it is.  
>  -Kinda feel like it's my mission to be the one thing you love about your life. Is that sick? Probably.  
>  -You like it when I'm sick and dark and weird.  
>  -We can communicate telepathically and this was almost immediately true.  
>  -I don't mean that in a stupid paranormal way but like, you look at me and I know what you're thinking, and vice versa.   
>  -Which is probably why we used to fight so much.  
>  -You're the only person I know who's smarter than me.  
>  -You overestimate my intelligence because you love me.  
>  -You do this to some degree with pretty much everyone you're attracted to. (Remember that podcast girl?) It should annoy me but it's kinda sweet or something.  
>  -You're polite to your family even though they don't deserve you.  
>  -You're extremely patient with idiots who want you to like them.  
>  -You never hold it against me when I lose my temper.  
>  -In fact I think you like it when I lose my shit and start getting mean.  
>  -Yet you somehow think I'm in control of my emotions at all times?  
>  -You could have been a very successful con man but you have too much integrity.  
>  -Other people's fake bullshit makes you genuinely sad, especially when they trick people into thinking they're legit or talented when they're just full of shit.  
>  -All your exes seem to still be in love with you.   
>  -I don't think I've ever met anyone who didn't eventually want you to either fuck them or be their best friend, usually both. Maybe I'm projecting. But I love that you'd pick me over all of them.  
>  -I don't need anyone else's respect as long as I have yours. This is another thing I don't always love about myself. But it's because you're my favorite, and the standard I hold myself to, and because there seems to be nothing I can do that will make you think I'm not so great.  
>  -You know all the awful stuff about me and love me anyway.  
>  -I never have to show anyone else the awful parts because I have you for that.  
>  -You're an emotional wreck and you still let me push all your buttons.   
>  -You're like twice my size, which yes I sometimes hate, but when it comes to fucking this is very appreciated.  
>  -The way your eyes change when you laugh.  
>  -Also how they look when you're angry, or depressed, or confused by me. Basically just everything about them.   
>  -That little side tooth gap.  
>  -Everything about how you are in bed.   
>  -If adolescent me had a Weird Science computer and made myself an ideal guy to make me seem cooler by association and also fuck me just right, he would be you.   
>  -Same goes for adult me.  
>  -How you moved to Milwaukee for me. Even though I was an asshole about it.  
>  -How you did all the fighting to keep us together, because I was a coward.  
>  -How I knew you would and that's why I did what I did and said what I said.  
>  -How wrecked you were when you came home for good and how you let me take care of you.  
>  -You're an affectionate drunk.  
>  -I can tell how often you want to touch me in public, but you don't.  
>  -That you want to believe in ghosts and soulmates and past lives.  
>  -You always want to pull me into your lap.   
>  -The comical attempts to fit yourself into my lap when I won't get into yours.  
>  -You hate being alone. I know you think I don't like this about you. But I do.  
>  -I would be crushed if I didn't think you wanted me with you nonstop. That's like my emotional compass. And I know it's not fair.  
>  -You give the best presents.   
>  -You're always warm, even when it's freezing out.  
>  -You have no willpower.   
>  -You could be in the most hateful mood toward me and all I have to do is give you that look ("sad, pleading") and you're mine.  
>  -Sometimes when I go to movies alone, 'cause I know it's something you'll hate, I turn toward you to whisper something out of habit and you're not there. Is this something I love about you, or something I hate about myself? Not sure. Makes my heart kinda heavy in a non-bad way every time, though.  
>  -You're snobby about all the right things and none of the wrong ones.  
>  -You hate it when I'm being fake.   
>  -The way you glue yourself to my side when we're with other people and you're anxious.  
>  -The Star Trek thing.  
>  -How wounded you get by upsetting movies.  
>  -How your voice has only gotten hotter over time.   
>  -Staying up talking in bed until we can't hold our eyes open and I'm letting you touch my hair because I'm too tired to stop you. And also it feels good.  
>  -The way you run your fingers through my hair when I'm sucking you off, and the way you pull it when you're fucking me. So good.  
>  -That I'm getting a little hard on this plane just for thinking about it.   
>  -You make me into a sex maniac. Or you bring that side of me out. Or you invented that side of me.  
>  -The way you look at me sometimes. Like I'm so amazing that it's killing you a little.   
>  -How smug you get when I look at you like that.   
>  -Also how you look at me with such utter disgust when I've expressed some opinion you disagree with. It's funny.  
>  -How you take every goddamn thing so personally.   
>  -Your instant dislike for anyone I deem tolerable.  
>  -The way you revel in my jerk behaviors.  
>  -All your crazy dimensions: your hands, arms, chest, dick, and eyes especially. I love how monster-y big you are.  
>  -I know you think I care too much about aesthetics but we look good together.   
>  -The way you contort yourself into like a thousand different positions in the process of watching a movie.   
>  -The way you touch your finger to your teeth when you're drunk and giddy.  
>  -The way you tilt your head back and look down your nose at me when I'm annoying you.   
>  -You always wake up before me and fall asleep after me.  
>  -How you get up in the middle of the night if you wake up and I've left the bed, and sit with me or watch me doing my psycho cleaning shit even though I tell you that you don't have to.  
>  -All your goofy hand gestures.   
>  -How you stick your fingers in my mouth after we've fucked, like it can't be over yet.  
>  -How you get me desperate for it like you're working a spell.  
>  -How you always hold onto me like you're afraid it could be the last time.  
>  -I'm the first person you look at when you're questioning something or surprised or delighted, because you need to know I feel the same.  
>  -The way you say my name, like it's a mocking nickname or like you're begging or like you're calling for help from the bottom of a well.  
>  -How you used to call me by my last name when you were mad at me.  
>  -Almost like you were accusing me of having an evil twin who went by that name.   
>  -And now I'm just always Jay.  
>  -How honest you are if you're asked about your feelings.  
>  -That email you sent me.  
>  -It made me miss you so much.   
>  -After just a day, jesus christ.   
>  -You're in my head and under my skin no matter where I go.  
>  -Wasn't sure I liked it until now.   
>  -Everything in me is leaning toward home because you're waiting for me there and I need you.   
>  -I don't even know who I am without you.   
>  -Which is not something I always love about myself.  
>  -But right now it feels pretty okay.  
> 

Fretting over every line and editing as he went somehow took three hours. When Jay looked up from his phone, the flight tracker said they would be in Milwaukee in thirty-five minutes. He felt sort of stunned, and also beaten, because he imagined Mike had pounded his reasons out in just twenty minutes, without hesitating or revising, and then hit send. 

Jay couldn’t hit send until they landed. He checked his draft several times to make sure it was actually saved, more worried about losing it than sending it now that it was a thing that existed. He felt shaky from the orange juice and from not knowing what awaited him back in Milwaukee. Mike, his coat? Or nothing? He got up to take a leak and stared at himself in the tiny airplane bathroom’s mirror. The lighting made his skin look yellowish. What if Mike fell in love with some little blond person who was ten years younger than him? It could happen, someday. And that person would love him back, properly this time. Mike was a catch, flaws and all. Everything about him communicated that he would protect the person he loved at any cost, that he would take all the battle damage in the relationship and deal out none. Who didn’t want to be near that energy and wrap themselves in it like a shield? Who would throw that away, thinking they could come get it later, that it would still be sitting there in the dumpster waiting for them after ten years, twenty years, thirty?

Jay went back to his seat and slumped there with his arms crossed over his chest, thinking again about that weekend they spent together at Mike’s parents’ house, after their first fuck, after Mike said he would of course have to move to Milwaukee. The sleet that had been loud enough against Mike’s bedroom window to wake Jay up and start him worrying turned to snow, and when Jay couldn’t wait any longer to extract himself from Mike’s endless embrace he told Mike he needed a shower. Mike said of course, right this way, and I’ll join you if that’s okay. Jay had felt cornered but agreed to it. They were in Mike’s house, after all.

He liked showering with Mike better than he’d anticipated, and became a lifelong fan of exchanging blow jobs in the shower. He also liked the humiliating yet extremely arousing feeling of Mike washing him up and cleaning him out, similar to how he’d felt when Mike had licked the come off his spent dick, like it was clearly his job to take care of these things, if he was going to take other things from Jay. He wore Mike’s clothes when they got dressed again, and let Mike crowd him on the couch when they watched movies, let Mike suck on his earlobe and feel him up through and then under his borrowed clothes, until they were going back to the bedroom for more sex. For Jay it felt like having a fever. The way Mike wanted him made him disoriented and hot all over, and it still felt impossible that he was allowed to touch Mike, too. His hands shook when he did. He would drop into a dreamless, exhausted sleep at intervals and would wake up to Mike kissing his hands, holding Jay’s curled fingers against his lips and looking at Jay guiltily when he opened his eyes and saw this happening.

Before Mike, Jay had never entertained the faintest hope that he could be worshiped like that by someone who loved him. He’d always assumed that, if he were ever able to scrape up some kind of serviceable romantic relationship, he would be the one who was tolerated by the object of his affection, and that keeping them relatively pleased with his company would be back-breaking, servile, nonstop work. He wasn’t insecure in most other areas, but nobody had looked twice at him through all of high school and college, he’d been ridiculed by bullies for being small and having bad teeth since he was a little kid, and he was well aware that he wasn’t emotionally mature enough to do anything but make people feel weird and awkward if he was stupid enough to try to seduce anyone, which he wasn’t. 

This was where he was at when Mike found him in the Hyatt basement at that convention and seemed to want him as a friend, and where he was at after many nights of getting erections for Mike’s voice on the phone and suddenly having Mike lunge at him for a kiss that they both had to treat as a joke when Jay reared away in horror, because what else could it be? 

If he’d met Mike in his mid-thirties, it would have been different, though sometimes Jay wondered if he ever would have grown a sense of confidence and improved his grooming skills if Mike hadn’t flipped his whole world on its side by wanting him back then. At twenty-one, Jay couldn’t help but view Mike’s obsession with him as suspicious. Foremost was his suspicion that this was happening due to a manic blip in Mike’s mental health that he would eventually recover from, leaving Jay behind. So he prepared himself at all times for Mike to get sick of him, and kept whatever distance he could manage, which wasn’t much. Mike was not easily deterred, and Jay wasn’t willing to go so far as not letting Mike fuck him anymore. He loved it too much, and loved Mike too much to not want to be with him most of the time anyway, just not all of the time, because he could feel parts of himself evaporating and being absorbed by Mike already. When Mike finally blew up at him for all the mixed signals, Jay took it as an opportunity to be the one who ruined things, though even then he didn’t really expect Mike to pick up and move across the country in response. 

See, he told himself when Mike left. You were right all along. You ripped open the festering wound you inflicted and picked at and he dumped you, he’s gone.

Only he wasn’t, even when they didn’t speak for months at a time. Jay still felt a connection to Mike that didn’t fade. The strain of being so far apart from Mike’s physical body caused a kind of bearable but nonstop agony, like a muscle that was stretched to its limit and gradually tiring out, but those three years were also when Jay grew a fledging sense of confidence, in his ability to appeal to someone like Mike and in general, because he was more okay than Mike was in the absence of their codependence. This taught him the lesson that he’d wanted to learn all along: he was better off alone. He finally felt grown up, maybe because he was so fucking miserable and bored. Then Mike came back, and they restarted the whole thing while pretending that wasn’t what they were doing, because they were much too smart and bitter and self-preserving for that, even while they slept curled up naked under blankets together. That was just a fluke, just part of fucking, just temporary until Mike moved on or Jay grew up the rest of the way and tried to even kiss someone else.

The plane started descending toward Milwaukee, and Jay’s sense of dread skyrocketed in a corresponding reverse trajectory. He reread the last two messages from Mike on his phone, trying to convince himself that Mike wouldn’t be there waiting for him at arrivals, that he’d had enough of Jay’s bullshit at last. Jay couldn’t exactly read a confirmation that Mike would show up with his coat from messages that said _you’re not a piece of shit jay_ and _I don’t want to talk about it_ , so it was safe to assume he might have to buy an ugly Packers jacket in the gift shop and get in an Uber. 

Just before landing the pilot informed them that the local time was six thirty in the evening and the current temperature was nineteen degrees and dropping. Half an inch of snow had fallen earlier. Jay had the aisle seat, and he craned his neck to see the lights from the city as they approached. Waking up late and running for the plane had made the whole day seem to pass much too quickly, and he was still on west coast time, uncomfortable with how dark it was outside already. 

The plane landed. Everyone went for their phones. Jay’s thumb was shaking just from turning airplane mode off and watching the wifi symbol reappear, but he didn’t hesitate. He sent his email of reasons to Mike, checked his sent folder to make sure it had gone out, then considered sending him a text to ask if he was at the airport. That seemed rude somehow, or like bad luck. It would also be very embarrassing if Mike wasn’t there. He grabbed his bag and prepared for the assault of cold that would hit him as soon as he stepped into the jet bridge. He was wearing the only sweatshirt he’d brought on the trip, an unzipped hoodie that wouldn’t do much against the below-freezing temperature.

He hurried along the bridge and toward the warmth of the terminal, trying not to be rude when old people in humungous coats were slow. He hadn’t eaten anything all day, and his pulse was racing. He’d shaken his head at the sad little packet of pretzels offered onboard, and now the emptiness in his stomach felt like some kind of omen. Mike picked on him for dieting, but Jay knew he was jealous, that he would do it if he could make himself care enough. He also knew Mike took pride in not giving a shit about what other people thought of him, in a way that Jay could never manage, which meant Mike would always be the cooler one and probably more attractive than Jay in some essential way that people picked up on subconsciously, via pheromones. 

Jay was desperate to eat something, but every fast food place he walked past in the terminal looked vile. He was tired and shaky, thinking about what he’d written in that email and Mike reading it, maybe right now. Maybe Mike would rush to the airport after reading it and having a change of heart, and they would just miss each other, Mike’s car going in one direction on the highway and Jay’s Uber heading in the other. That felt like what they’d been doing this whole time, moving in opposite directions and just missing each other, though in all the important ways they had always been together, even when they were physically apart. Jay had known he’d spend the whole trip obsessing over Mike. Being that much farther from him only made the howling need to return to his side louder. 

He remembered thinking, with his head on Mike’s chest and Mike’s heart beating under his ear, that weekend at Mike’s parents’ house, somewhere between his sixth and seventh orgasm: this is so unlike me. As if he even knew who he was yet. And Mike had grown up picturing himself falling in love with someone soft and sweet who would take care of him and raise his children. Then he saw Jay sitting in a Hyatt conference chair, wearing an oversized Toxic Avenger t-shirt with sleeves that hung almost to his elbows, probably making some stupid face that showed his teeth, and maybe some part of Mike already knew his plans were fucked. 

“You’re like a knife,” Mike said to him once when they were drinking together and Jay had said something funny but cruel to him, mostly on accident. “I don’t know why I keep trying to swallow you.”

“I know why,” Jay had said, and he gave Mike a look like he wanted to fuck, which was all he really knew back then, not yet having read the reasons. 

_You’re mean as fuck, I love it._

Jay was a mess by the time he got to domestic arrivals, jumpy and alternating between feeling like this was the end of his journey and like he had so much farther to go. 

The arrivals hall was crowded and cold, the sliding exit doors near the baggage claim letting the icy air sneak inside. Jay could feel his face turning red while he scanned the crowd, trying not to look over-obvious about it just in case Mike was actually there and might catch him looking expectant. But Mike wasn’t there. People were falling together, finding each other, leaning into each other’s arms. They all had proper coats on, hats and gloves. Jay was shivering and ignored. Mike hadn’t come.

“Jay!” 

Except that of course he had. Mike was standing against the wall, near the recycling bins, holding Jay’s coat and looking annoyed, then startled, because Jay was running to him.

“Jay?” Mike said again, like suddenly he wasn’t sure this was the right one, because Jay was throwing his bag down and flinging his arms around Mike, clinging hard and lifting his hot face to hide it against Mike’s throat, and this wasn’t something Jay had ever done, not even in private. “Okay, hey,” Mike said, softer, and he wrapped Jay’s coat around him like maybe he was just cold, or needed it to hide more completely, though probably nobody was looking. 

Jay wouldn’t know. He had his eyes smashed shut and his face pressed to Mike’s warm skin, was going to maybe break down and fucking cry because Mike smelled so good. Jay couldn’t make himself let go or stop taking deep breaths full of the scent of him.

“What’s wrong?” Mike asked, murmuring this soft against Jay’s ear and rubbing his back. “Hey, what’s the matter? Look at me, c’mere.” 

Jay didn’t want to, but he obeyed, sinking onto the flats of his feet and staring up at Mike, showing him his red cheeks and watery eyes and all his terrified, grateful, burning need.   
  
“Did you get my email?” Jay asked when Mike just gaped at the expression on his face.

“You-- What? No, when?”

“I just-- Just sent it, when the plane landed. You should read it.”

“Okay.” Mike frowned and loosened his grip on Jay’s sides. “It’s some kind of bad news, I guess?”

“No, it’s not bad news. I don’t think. Mike.” Jay threw himself onto Mike’s chest again and clung, moaning. “Missed you,” he said, muttering this into Mike’s coat, which smelled like snow and beer and home. 

“Mhm,” Mike said, winding both arms around Jay. He pressed his cheek to Jay’s forehead and held him tight. “You’re all shaken up, though. What happened, you okay?”

“I’m okay. I’m okay, I’m fine. Sorry. Mph. Okay, sorry.”

Jay pulled free, forcing himself to stop making a scene. He was back in the midwest, where public affection was weird, even in airports, after a certain point. He pushed his arms into the sleeves of his coat and held Mike’s worried gaze. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t come?” Mike asked. 

“Did you want me to think maybe you wouldn’t?”

Mike grunted and reached down to pick up Jay’s bag. He slung it over his shoulder and tucked his arm across Jay’s back, turning him toward the exit. Jay would normally protest both actions: Mike carrying something for him, and Mike putting an arm around him where people might see. He didn’t say anything, just pressed himself more tightly against Mike’s side as they walked out into the icy cold night together.

“I guess, yeah,” Mike said when they were walking through the parking deck. “I did sorta want you to wonder if I’d show up for you. You really piss me off, Jay.”

“I know,” Jay said. 

“But it’s fine, you know, I mean. I didn’t want you to not have your coat.” 

“It’s not fine. Read your email.” 

“Right now?”

“Once you’ve got the heat going in the car.”

They found Mike’s car and climbed in together. Mike threw Jay’s bag into the backseat, turned on the engine and cranked the heat. He looked over at Jay and cocked his head, was clearly trying not to smile. 

“Jay,” he said. “Are you, like. Crying?”

“No!” 

He wasn’t. He was glaring, if anything, but he let Mike chortle obnoxiously and also pull him over for a kiss. Jay bit Mike’s bottom lip, more gently than he wanted to, then sighed in surrender and slid his tongue against Mike’s. He was so hungry, wet-mouthed and moaning into the kiss, holding onto Mike’s coat collar with both hands. 

“You smell so fucking good,” Jay said when they pulled apart to breathe puffs of visible air into each other’s faces, the heater still trying to combat the cold that had crept into the car while Mike waited in arrivals. 

“You smell like a swimming pool,” Mike said. He leaned in for another kiss, but Jay pulled away and shook his head.

“Read your email,” Jay said, letting go of Mike’s coat and settling back into the passenger seat.

“Jesus, okay,” Mike said, looking nervous. He dug out his phone with a complaining sigh and pulled up his email while Jay watched. 

Jay’s heart was slamming. He wasn’t sure what he was afraid of. He just needed this to happen now, not later. He needed to know how Mike was going to respond. 

Mike cupped his phone in one hand, brought it up to his face and kept his expression pretty neutral as he read Jay’s reasons. Sometimes his brow would pinch slightly, and a couple of times his lips tugged up at the corner before he looked serious again. He didn’t pause to look up at Jay, but after a couple of minutes he reached over to put his hand on Jay’s thigh. His hand was warm even through Jay’s jeans and provided instant comfort, totally different from Simon’s in the backseat of that Uber. Jay put his hand over Mike’s and squeezed his fingers. All he could think about was wanting Mike, wanting every fucking thing about him so much. His thigh was shaking in Mike’s grip.

“I wasn’t trying to extort this from you when I sent mine,” Mike said when he finished reading and looked up. He rubbed Jay’s thigh and leaned over to kiss his cheek. “Thanks, though,” he said, ducking his gaze away. 

“I’ve never had sex with anyone but you,” Jay said, and that got Mike’s attention, his eyes snapping up to lock on Jay’s. Jay nodded as if Mike had asked out loud: seriously?

“I know,” Mike said, frowning. 

“You-- What?”

“I mean. I guess I didn’t know, but. I kinda thought so. Hoped so, if we’re being honest.” 

“You-- Then why--”

“You’re really going to ask me why I fuck other people? You, really? The person who basically told me to?” 

Jay wrinkled his nose but didn’t deny that. He had.

“I don’t want you to anymore,” he said, heart hammering. “It bothers me. I hate it.”

Mike’s eyebrows went up. He nodded, shrugged. 

“Me too,” he said.

“So you can make some demand of me in exchange,” Jay said, squeezing Mike’s fingers so hard by then that it had to be hurting him. Mike just let him do it, didn’t even flinch. 

“Uhh,” Mike said when Jay stared at him, waiting to hear his answering demand. He shook his head. “All of mine are too big.” 

“Too big, like-- What?”

“Jesus christ, Jay, don’t you just want to go home? What even happened to you in L.A.? Just let me take you home, how’s that?”

Jay turned away from him and crossed his arms over his chest. Were they fighting, really? He wasn’t sure what he’d thought would happen when Mike read his reasons. Was Mike that mad about Jay’s delayed response? Maybe Jay’s reasons just weren’t good enough. Mike still had his hand on Jay’s thigh, and was steering the car out of the parking deck one-handed. Even the way he drove was hot. Jay wrinkled his nose at his reflection in the passenger side window, annoyed by this. 

“I know you think I wrecked your life,” Mike said.

“What?” Jay whirled toward him. “I do not!” 

“You do, too, but don’t worry, I’ve never bought into that shit. You’re like a mind maze designed by a sadist. I don’t even know what’s happening right now. I never know! The good stuff always turns into a trap. You’re difficult, Jay. You’re a difficult boy.”

“Boy?” Jay shoved Mike’s hand off him, glowering. “I’m forty years old!”

“Not till September!”

Jay snorted and started laughing without meaning to. Mike was laughing, too, his chest bouncing with it. He beamed out at the highway ahead like he actually knew this good stuff wasn’t a trap, finally. 

“That’s on the list of reasons, too,” Mike said. “Can’t remember if I included it or not.”

“What, that you think I’m a sadistic torture device?”

“Yes!” Mike said, holding his finger up in Jay’s face with genuine glee, like he’d figured it out at last. “Because, listen. Remember that script I wrote about the robot filled with explosives, designed to look like a beautiful woman? And how the guy falls in love with it? That was about you.” 

“No shit,” Jay said. He hadn’t been particularly flattered.

“I don’t know, I guess it’s just the romantic in me. I like the challenge of cuddling up to a dirty bomb. Remember when I said I wanted to call the movie Bombshell, and you said that was the stupidest thing you’d ever heard in your life? Well, Jay. You were right.” 

“I remember telling you that you’d never be able to cast the kind of knockout actress you had in mind.”

“Oh, Jay. We both know I was going to pressure you into the playing the robot in the end.”

“We-- Don’t both know that? Huh?”

“I mean, I was playing the guy! Who else was I gonna be in love with? I’m not that good of an actor.”

“God, never mind. I forget what you’re like until I’m with you again.”

“You missed the fuck out of me,” Mike said, poking Jay in the cheek with his obnoxious, wagging finger. “Admit it.”

“I did admit it!” Jay said, slapping him away. “I wrote you a whole fucking email saying so! Jesus, did you even read it?”

“Yes,” Mike said, and he looked over Jay, maybe with some measure of apology. “I loved it. I did. Sorry, I’m just really glad you’re back. It’s all I can think about. Having you back, and how easy it is to get you going. Look at you, you’re ready to hit me already. So fucking cute.” 

Jay lifted his fist to punch Mike’s shoulder, then stopped himself. That was exactly what Mike had just said he would do, so: no. He wouldn’t give Mike the satisfaction. 

“I’m over here half hard because of what you wrote about me pulling your hair,” Mike said after they’d both been silent for a while. “By the way.” 

“Fuck you. Don’t repeat any of that stuff to me. It’s not for saying out loud.” 

“Aw, Jay. Remember when you gave me that big speech about why you don’t say you love me? You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, you were pretty drunk. It had something to do with David Lynch. Naturally. Like, how he refuses to explain his movies, because that would ruin it, because he tells stories in this other language that’s not English. The language of cinema! Jesus. Do you remember any of this?”

“No,” Jay muttered, furious. He did, though. He would have guessed that Mike was the one who didn’t remember that conversation. 

“You were telling me it’s bigger than words and that trying to articulate it with this trite, common phrase cheapens it. And I’m like, what’s ‘it’? You won’t even go on a date with me.” 

“We go to the movies all the time. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, since I guess all I do is let you down, but I’ve spent half of my life with you. Almost literally, soon. What the hell difference is a date going to make?”

“I don’t know anymore, Jay. You’ve Stockholm Syndrome’d me into feeling the same way, at this point.”

“Then what are you complaining about? What do you want? Huh?” Jay hit Mike’s shoulder then, but not very hard. “You get to make a demand, I told you.”

“Honestly?”

“Yes, honestly! Fuck!”

“I-- Just wanted you to ask me to stop fucking other people, uh, so. That’s making me really happy right now. Even though I’m continuing to complain. So that’s enough, thank you.”

Jay huffed and stared out the passenger side window. He also reached over and put his hand on Mike’s thigh, squeezing a little, wanting to touch him everywhere. He’d forgotten to include Mike’s thighs on his list of huge parts of Mike that he loved. He chewed his lip to keep from grinning when Mike picked up his hand and kissed his knuckles.

“So how was L.A.?” Mike asked, rubbing his thumb over the back of Jay’s hand when he’d lowered it to his thigh again. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Jay said, earnestly. “Have you been busy at the shop?”

“I got one phone call yesterday, but it was a hang-up.”

“Hmm.” Jay supposed Mike probably knew it had been him. “It was weird to talk on the phone with you again. Kinda good, like. After all this time. But mostly it made me miss you too much.” 

“Yeah,” Mike said, sounding wistful, and Jay was surprised when he didn’t say anything else. 

Jay glanced over at Mike and saw his opportunity to taunt Mike for kind of looking like he might cry. 

He tightened his grip on Mike’s thigh and pretended not to notice, turned back to the window and watched Milwaukee pass by outside, comforted by its unassuming familiarity. Moving to the city after high school had felt like such a big deal, though he’d already had some quiet angst about the fact that he hadn’t moved instead to L.A. or New York, even Chicago. He’d hated his revolving cast of roommates, and the day he finally got his own place in Milwaukee, where every inch of space was his alone and no one could steal or misuse his things, was the second best day of his life. The first was the day he met Mike.

They arrived at Jay’s place, which wasn’t far from the airport, and Jay didn’t need to ask Mike to come up. Mike parked the car and followed Jay inside without a word. This was only the second apartment Jay had ever had all to himself, slightly nicer than the first one but still nothing fancy. But to him it was a sacred mini universe that he’d made all his own, and he was so happy to be back that he wanted to sink to his knees in the foyer, especially because Mike was with him.

Jay dropped his bag on the floor and slowly lifted his gaze to meet Mike’s. He wasn’t sure if he was doing his sad, pleading look or not. Probably he just looked like he wanted to be shoved across the room, fucked into oblivion and then brought dinner in bed. Mike stepped toward him, put his hands on Jay’s face and stroked his thumbs over Jay’s cheekbones, staring down into eyes. They were both breathing kind of hard. 

“I really loved your reasons,” Jay said, barely above a whisper. “I got out of a car in the middle of traffic when I read them. It was like diving out of a plane. I’m pretty sure I almost died that night, at least twice. But it was the best fucking feeling, like. Being so desperate to stay alive because I had to claw my way back to you, or you’d never know.”

“I’d never know what, Jay,” Mike asked, tipping Jay’s head back a little.

“The-- My reasons.”

Jay swallowed after saying so. He put his hands on Mike’s waist and tugged him a little closer. His fingers were shaking, maybe just because he was so hungry, or because the weather was a shock to his system after three days under clear skies and sunshine.

“Are you cold?” Mike asked, cupping his hands around Jay’s cheeks. 

Jay shook his head. He took his coat off and dropped it on top of his bag, then took Mike’s off for him and hung it up on the hook by the door. There was only one hook, for one coat. Jay had done that on purpose.

“I’m sorry I’m like this,” Jay said, not sure if he meant it. 

“Like what?” Mike said, frowning. 

“Um. I dunno.”

“I wouldn’t change a fucking thing, Jay. Get over here.” 

Jay hurried into Mike’s arms and surged up to kiss him, arching onto his toes so he could wind his arms around Mike’s neck. Mike sighed into Jay’s mouth and picked him up off the floor, hoisting him up so that his legs were wrapped around Mike, too.

“And what do you mean you almost died?” Mike said, looking distressed about it when Jay pulled back to grin at him. 

“Oh, god. Fuck me first, and feed me. Then maybe I’ll tell you the whole story.” 

“I’ll feed you all right,” Mike said, carrying him to the bedroom. 

Mike had always kept Jay as well fed as Jay would let him. He’d always fought Jay’s attempts to starve himself, and it was a battle Jay had never been more happy to let Mike win. He sat on the edge of his bed and Mike stood in front of him, tapping his cock against Jay’s lips and teasing Jay until he was whining for it, digging his too-short nails into Mike’s thighs. Sometimes Jay woke up chewing his nails off in his sleep. Mike would take Jay’s hand out of his mouth if he woke up first and saw him doing this, and would hold Jay's small hands between his big ones, to protect them. 

Jay sighed with deep satisfaction when Mike finally fed his dick into Jay’s mouth, slowly, letting him savor it. He moaned when Mike dragged his fingers roughly through his hair and again when he grabbed a handful and tugged before shoving in deeper, without warning. Jay just drooled for it and worked his tongue hungrily against the underside, wanting more. He wouldn’t be okay until Mike filled him up everywhere, twice, maybe three times, until Jay couldn’t think and barely even knew where he was, except that he was with Mike, overflowing with him, buzzing and blissed out, knowing that he’d taken everything Mike had to give him. 

Mike came in Jay’s mouth and pushed him onto his back while he was still breathless from swallowing it all down. Jay was so hard, and Mike wasn’t touching his cock, wouldn’t do that until later. Jay didn’t dare touch it himself, just slid his hands over his chest and whimpered when Mike grabbed his wrists and and pinned them to the bed. 

“Let me,” Mike said, right in Jay’s ear, and then his mouth was on Jay’s chest, alternating between biting and licking at his nipples in a way that made Jay writhe up against any friction he could get and wonder if he could come just from this. If Mike was inside him, maybe he could.

“Please, god,” he said, rubbing his face against Mike’s stubble when Mike paused his assault on Jay’s nipples to breathe heavily against his hot cheek. “Just, put-- Anything, in me, fuck, I need it--”

“Anything?” Mike snorted. “Uh, such as?”

“Your-- You fucker, your fuh, fingers, tongue, your dick, please, I don’t care.”

“You don’t care, huh? As long as whatever goes up your ass is mine.”

“Yes, oh, fuck. Please?”

Mike made a soft noise, like Jay had stabbed him in the heart with that shaky little _please_. He kissed Jay on the mouth, shoving his tongue in deep and making him newly breathless, then pulled free abruptly and made a racket when he moved away to get the lube, throwing stuff around in Jay’s bedside drawer. 

“You love wrecking my shit,” Jay said, beaming up at Mike when he had the lube and was dumping some messily onto his fingers. 

“Don’t know why I’m bothering with this,” Mike said, throwing the bottle of lube across the bed like it had offended him. “Could probably shove in dry, you’d take it when you’re like this.”

Jay just whined and curled his hands into fists. He still had his arms up over his head and pressed against the mattress, as if Mike had left him in shackles. 

“When I’m like what,” Jay said, not denying that he would take anything. He felt like some part of him still hadn’t landed, like Mike needed to catch him and pin him in place, and then he’d really be home. 

“Hmm,” Mike said, leaning down over him. He dragged his wet fingers over where Jay wanted them stuffed in and grinned when Jay went crazy for it and tried to jam himself down onto them. “When you’re like-- Let’s see. What’s the word. Just, dumb for how much you want it. Almost drunk or something. God, the look on your face.”

“Mike,” Jay said, and his hands flinched on the mattress when he felt spit pooling at the corner of his lips. He licked it up and blinked rapidly, staring up at Mike and pushing his hips down, feeling too empty to live.

Mike needed it bad, same as Jay, too much to make him wait long or beg the way Jay sometimes had to when Mike was really determined to watch him fall apart, to see his eyes start to leak. Jay groaned deep in his chest for the push of Mike’s fat fingers inside him, already wanting more. He thrashed and cursed and squeezed Mike’s arms. Mike was hard again, rubbing his cock against Jay’s leg. Their bodies still behaved like they were twenty years younger when they were together like this, because that was what they remembered from the first time and all the times after, and it was like some kind of magic that Jay would never admit to believing in. 

Jay’s breath caught when Mike pulled his fingers out. He’d been teased close to coming by then, was sharply aware of a kind of burning near-overstimulation deep inside him and the insistent, drumbeat throb of his cock, which was drooling onto his stomach, pressed tight against his belly. He almost didn’t care about coming, felt brainless with the need to just be filled again, more deeply, with that different, long-sliding burn and the stretch against his rim that felt almost impossible at first, just for half a breath, and then so fucking good. He stared up at Mike, distantly aware that he was being admired when Mike sat back on his knees, his chest heaving while he slicked himself up.

“Please,” Jay said, though he knew Mike wasn’t going to make him wait much longer. He wanted to say it, wanted Mike to hear how desperate and lost he felt without it.

“What would you have done without me?” Mike said, running one fingertip along the length of Jay’s aching cock, making him shudder all over. “Huh? Who, just-- Who the hell would you have done this with?”

“Nobody,” Jay said, meaning it. He gave Mike a look like he was angry, not about the inevitability of needing him but that he had the nerve to ask, to act like he didn’t already know. “No-- Nobody. I’d have been, ah. A monk. A priest. The exorcist.”

Mike grinned. He did a few fast blinks like maybe his eyes were a little wet, then pressed himself against where Jay was waiting for him, rubbed a few taunting circles there and watched Jay’s eyes sink shut slowly as he pushed inside.

Jay went someplace every time he took Mike’s cock in like that, to some other planet where he could be melted and mindless but still alive, or more alive than ever, feeling blood-hot all over and like his rapid heartbeat had spread across his skin, a flicker that spiked rising pleasure over the whole surface of him, pulling it outward from deep inside. When Mike was all in they both groaned, sweat beading across their chests when they pressed together and kissed sloppily, Jay’s legs pressed up so that his knees were nearly touching his shoulders. At other times he would have his face pressed to the bed, ass lifted, or would be bouncing in Mike’s lap without shame, but this was probably his favorite, at least in the present moment: being so tipped open and spread apart that he didn’t even know what he was beyond a sweaty, panting thing that belonged to Mike, who belonged inside him, right there. Jay put his shaky arms around Mike’s neck and held him in place, squeezing in slow pulses around his cock and trying to fit his tired legs around Mike’s back, too. 

“That what you needed?” Mike asked, murmuring this into Jay’s sweat-damp beard.

“Nngh,” Jay said, eyes closed, head lolling. “Yes, yuh-- Yeah. _Fuck_ , yes.”

“Mph, well-- Not quite, though, I think. Think you want to be fucked hard, also.”

“Oh-- Yes, yeah, please, Mike--”

He only had to ask once, which was rare, even if they hadn’t fucked in weeks, months, once after a whole year. This felt different, maybe because of the recent physical distance. Neither of them had the patience to pretend they didn’t just want to slam together as hard as they could, to grit their teeth and groan and disappear into it entirely. Jay came all over himself for Mike’s third or fourth inward thrust, and let himself drift even off the surface of the planet he’d gone to before then, into space, liquid and warm and taking everything Mike had, until Mike had poured all of it into him.

Jay groaned and felt a twinge in his lower back as he returned to himself, feeling Mike sliding out of him. He didn’t care, loved it when it hurt a little after, because it made the parts he’d been too spaced out to experience as his mundane self feel real in a different way, offering proof they had happened on this planet, too. He grabbed for Mike and kissed him, let Mike roll him into his arms. He loved knowing that his bed would smell like their fuck, like Mike’s sweat and Mike’s come, and laughed deliriously against Mike’s chest when he realized he didn’t really need to covet these things like someone who couldn’t just always have them whenever he wanted. 

“Hmm?” Mike said, asking why Jay was laughing. He had his face buried in Jay’s hair, his arms wrapped tight around him.

“Nothing,” Jay said. “I’m just happy or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” Mike said, mocking his voice. He kissed the top of Jay’s head. “Yeah, okay. Me too. Milwaukee sucks without you.” 

“You love Milwaukee!”

“Jay. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I only ever loved it because you were here.”

“Mhm.” Jay kissed Mike’s throat, where his pulse was still pumping hard. “What if I’d moved to L.A.? Would you have followed me out there, too?”

“I would have followed you to Siberia. Or, uh. Cleveland!” 

“The mistake by the lake,” Jay said, because that always got an easy laugh out of Mike. Jay grinned and rubbed his face against Mike’s chest when he shook with laughter. 

Jay was still floating, part of him drifting weightless through space. He rolled over to press his back to Mike’s chest and fell asleep almost instantly, wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he woke to the feeling of Mike stirring behind him, then peeling away.

“Nuh, what--” Jay reached back blindly and grabbed Mike’s arm, his side. “Where, what? You’re going?”

“I have a surprise that I have to go get for you.” Mike kissed Jay’s ear, rubbed his chest. “I’ll be right back, I promise. It’ll be worth it.”

“No, wait, just.” Jay was half-asleep, remembering some bad dream he’d had earlier that day, in another part of the country and another time zone, in some pretend-lifetime that had also felt too real. “Don’t leave me,” he said, in a wimpy little voice that he could play off as a joke if necessary but which also represented real, authentic begging.

Mike moaned and wrapped Jay up in his arms again, squeezed him. He stayed there for a while, pressing soft kisses to Jay’s neck until he was almost asleep, then moved away. 

“The stores will all be closed if I don’t go now,” Mike said when Jay whined and grabbed for him again. “You don’t have anything in your fridge. You need to eat something. I won’t take long, just get some sleep. You won’t even miss me.”

That wasn’t true. Jay let Mike go but did miss him, even when he wasn’t conscious. He had weird dreams about grocery stores, about being trapped in them during a disaster, and these segued into a nightmare resembling _The Mist_. When he woke up with a gasp Mike was there, leaning over him and kissing his shoulder, telling him it was okay.

Jay fell asleep again. He had no energy left, had barely registered Mike mopping at his ass with a towel to clean him up after they fucked. He liked the feeling that he didn’t have to pay attention to his surroundings for a while, was exhausted after three days of being on edge in an unfamiliar city, but it was only effective when some subconscious part of him knew that Mike was nearby. He woke up to the sound of his oven timer going off and sat up in bed. 

He found Mike in the kitchen and tried not to beam too dorkily when he realized Mike was making him potato skins, all the ingredients laid out messily on Jay’s kitchen counter and the scent of baking potatoes filling his apartment. Jay had dressed in a thermal shirt and boxer shorts, and he sat on one of the stools facing the bar that looked in at his little kitchen, chewing his lip. Mike was pink-cheeked when he finally met Jay’s eyes, maybe just flushed from the exertion of cooking.

“I’m fucking starving,” Jay said, folding his arms on the bartop and showing Mike his dorky grin. 

“I know,” Mike said, his voice wobbling a little, like hearing this had torn his heart out. 

They ate on the couch while watching _Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home_ , which happened to be on TV. Jay laughed a lot and talked about how much he loved the date scene in the Italian restaurant. He leaned against Mike’s side and checked Mike’s face from time to time, because Mike had gotten quiet. Mike’s expression remained serious, but he smiled at Jay when nudged. 

“What’s wrong?” Jay asked, tugging on Mike’s arm, finally unafraid of the answer.

“Nothing,” Mike said. “Just, uh. Before, when you were asleep. You were like, ‘don’t leave me!’ Jay, you know. Um. You know I don’t want to leave, right? Like, that I’ll stay?”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“Oh-- Well. Wait, what?”

“I wasn’t asleep. Just stay, I want you to.”

Jay leaned over to peck Mike on the lips, then turned back to the movie, which was almost over. He kept hold of Mike’s arm, could feel Mike staring at him. He supposed he would have to expand on this statement eventually, and explain what _I want you to stay_ meant exactly. Maybe he would have to say it in some vow-like way. His poor kitchen was a mess from Mike’s effort to cook for him. There were shreds of cheese on the floor, a sour cream-smeared spoon left in the sink, slimy green onions stuck to the countertops. It was a disaster zone, but it had also been a delicious meal: filling, comforting, made with love. Worth it.

**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listened to [The Alarmist by Pinegrove](https://open.spotify.com/album/4QvjJqt88DNMj151vhaSpS) about 900 times while writing this. The delivery of "my heart is out in the gaaarbage" is the most Them thing ever. Quite annoyed that there is no YouTube link for it!!
> 
> Fortunately this fic's other theme song, [Fireworks (Reprise) by Radiator Hospital](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDaFEGxOsXg), is available in my preferred format. 
> 
> Thanks for reading, happy v-day! <3


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